Mother-to-be Kathleen Founds made a routine physician’s appointment to debate the dangers of antidepressants in being pregnant. After the go to, Founds, who depends on medicine to quell the manic highs and despondent lows of bipolar dysfunction, realized the doctor was out of community.
She acquired a shock invoice for $650, launching her right into a maze of declare kinds and hours on the telephone being routed from one workplace to the subsequent to dispute the costs — insurance coverage crimson tape that so many Americans have encountered. A decade later, Founds captured her expertise in a graphic novel, “Bipolar Bear and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Health Insurance,” a richly illustrated, darkly humorous fable for adults concerning the nation’s dysfunctional well being system.
The e-book, revealed in November, follows Theodore, an clever however angst-ridden bear, on his quest for therapy for his personal manic-depressive sickness. But first he should navigate the calls for of the WeCare firm, a shady outfit run by cigar-smoking felines who revenue unfairly from a lopsided economic system and a corrupt justice system, amongst different issues. His fellow outcasts embrace such characters as an overeducated owl drowning in scholar debt and a bomb-sniffing pet affected by PTSD.
America is internationally identified for high-quality care, for many who can afford it. A brand new Gallup Poll reveals {that a} record-high proportion of Americans — 38% — postponed medical care due to excessive prices in 2022. Federal and state “no surprise” legal guidelines of the previous few years search to guard shoppers from surprising medical payments. But they don’t stop bills like excessive deductibles or charges hidden within the high quality print of their insurance coverage insurance policies.
“Bipolar Bear” joins different current works to shine a light-weight on well being inequities — a part of the rising style of graphic drugs. It consists of seminal sickness narratives reminiscent of “Mom’s Cancer” by Brian Fies and nurse MK Czerwiek’s “Taking Turns: Stories from the HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371” in addition to “Rx,” Rachel Lindsay’s memoirs about taking a job at a pharmaceutical firm to safe insurance coverage to cowl therapy for bipolar dysfunction.
Descended from the underground comics of the Sixties, graphic drugs has grown into a brand new discipline of scholarship on the medium’s position within the examine and supply of well being care, stated Ian Williams, the Welsh doctor who coined the time period again in 2007. “It’s ideal for exploring subjects having to do with one’s life and well-being in an ironic and funny way,” he stated.
As Founds places it, humor is a strong weapon in opposition to despair.
The 40-year-old mom of two teaches English at a neighborhood faculty in Santa Cruz County on California’s central coast. She has by no means taken an artwork class and didn’t got down to write a graphic novel. The e-book started as a doodle within the margins of her pocket book whereas learning for a grasp’s diploma in fiction writing at Syracuse University in New York. Her 2014 novel in brief tales, “When Mystical Creatures Attack,” is a couple of instructor who suffers a nervous breakdown and communicates along with her college students from a psychiatric hospital.
KHN contributing reporter Rachel Scheier spoke to Founds about bringing Theodore to life. The interview has been edited for size and readability.
Q: How did you come to put in writing a e-book a couple of bear with bipolar dysfunction?
I’d been making kids’s books for my little brother. They had been all about angst-ridden animals: a lonely big squid, a possum with social anxiousness dysfunction who falls asleep each time he’s in a clumsy state of affairs, a burro who desires to be a unicorn. My objective was to put in writing a novel. But each time I used to be too depressed to string a sentence collectively, I’d draw bears. Then I spotted that anybody coping with a psychological well being subject on this nation goes to must take care of the labyrinth of medical health insurance. And I assumed it will be enjoyable to depict it as an precise labyrinth with trapdoors and man-eating flowers. Once I went in that route, it was not a kids’s e-book.
Q: Was the e-book primarily based by yourself expertise with psychological sickness?
Yes. I had my first main depressive episode on the finish of highschool, however I didn’t hunt down skilled assist. I simply kind of muddled via it. Then, once I was a sophomore at Stanford, I had my first manic episode. I had a sequence of realizations concerning the nature of the universe, and I didn’t sleep or eat very a lot. Then, in graduate college, I went to a clinic as a result of I used to be going via a melancholy, and the psychiatrist requested me questions like “Was there ever a time when you had a lot of energy and didn’t feel a need to sleep?” And I stated, “Oh, sure, but that was a spiritual awakening.” So, I needed to reframe my life story a bit after that.
Q: But faith nonetheless has a task in your life?
I’m a Quaker. It’s one thing I got here to via my curiosity in nonviolent social change. When I’m severely depressed, I really feel like life has no goal. So, following a code that claims life does have that means, that we’re all linked by a drive of affection that undergirds the universe, is one thing that has helped me lots.
Q: Why animals?
People are onerous to attract! Cartoon animals are lots simpler. I wasn’t thinking about artwork at school — really, once I began drawing was throughout that first manic episode. I don’t suggest writing a 200-page graphic novel with no inventive coaching. I imply, it took 13 years, however I did end it.
Q: Why did it take so lengthy?
I labored on it on and off whereas I used to be writing essays and dealing on the beginnings of a number of different novels. When I lastly completed it, I used to be so excited. I used to be able to see it on bookshelves inside a 12 months. I despatched it to my agent, and he or she wrote me a really good electronic mail which stated, “I love this. It’s very creative. But there’s no way I can sell it.” Most graphic novels for grownups are memoir — there wasn’t a transparent style. Then one other agent I reached out to stated, “I can’t take this on, but you should try Graphic Mundi, which had published several novels in the field of graphic medicine.”
Q: What made you need to write about medical health insurance?
Our system is definitely killing individuals. We have a excessive suicide fee on this nation, and individuals are not capable of entry psychological well being care. And then, after they do get assist, it’s not essentially the psychiatrist who determines the course of care; it’s the insurance coverage firm. If you go right into a room of 10 Americans, 5 can inform you a medical health insurance nightmare story.
But I additionally needed to discover what it means to develop a wholesome way of life and develop a powerful neighborhood and undergo all this development and therapeutic that Bipolar Bear goes via within the story, solely to have the melancholy come again once more. What is the that means of my journey if I discover myself proper again the place I used to be earlier than? Ultimately, there’s no reply to that query, however there’s a proper factor to do, which is to ask for assist. We’re all saved by one another.
This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially impartial service of the California Health Care Foundation.