Funny Story Theme

“It’s Kind of a Funny Story” “It’s so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself” (Vizzini 9) Depression is a mental illness that affects roughly over 350 million people worldwide. Those 350 million people may be a different age, race/ethnicity, or be in a different social position. It affects anyone, regardless of who you are or you come from. The book, “It’s Kind of a Funny Story,” focuses on that topic and how people with different backgrounds deal with their mental illness. One of the major of many themes in this book is that depression can affect anyone, no matter what their life is like, but it gets better once you learn to accept it as well as yourself. To begin with, the main character Craig has depression, but

He just knows that it slowly built up from the time he got accepted into a top, prestigious school. He didn’t believe he was smart and that everyone else was better than him, despite the fact that he made 93s in every class. To him that meant that “you’re average. There are a lot of you. You aren’t going over the top” (Vizzini 63). Those thoughts escalated to “stress vomiting” (Vizzini 65), not eating, and suicidal ideation. Those thoughts got to be too much one night when he decided to actually commit suicide. He believed that he would never get better, “This is such a farce, this whole thing. I thought I was better and I’m not better. I tried to get stable and I can’t get stable. I tried to turn the corner and there aren’t any corners; I can’t eat; I can’t sleep; I’m just wasting resources” (Vizzini 82). The night he decided to do it, he realized that “[he] want to live but [he] want to die” (Vizzini 90), leading him to call suicide hotline. The operator advised Craig to go to the Emergency Room immediately. Once he went to the E.R and the doctor checked him, he was sent to a mental hospital. This was Craig 's first step in accepting that he needed help, which isn’t easy to do for many people going through the same