How do you draw depression? For the British cartoonist and illustrator Gemma Correll, it comes naturally. “Some emotions are really hard to write about,” she says. “And for me different ones evoke different shapes: depression feels heavy like a big blob while anxiety is more spiky and loud, with all these little sparks coming off it that sometimes gather into a bigger storm. At least that is how I see them.”
Plenty of others now see them that way too, thanks to Correll. The artist, 42, has been sharing her illustrations online since the dawn of Instagram circa 2010 when her fanbase ballooned as strangers, and particularly millennials, recognised themselves in her cutesy cartoons about overthinking, phone anxiety, and bed-rotting. “Am I even good enough to have imposter syndrome?” one of her cartoons reads. Another, titled Things I Have Cried About While Pre-Menstrual, lists off “disappointing ravioli”, “an old person eating an ice cream”, and “the state of the world or whatever” next to doodled faces expressing various levels of sadness.
While today’s youth is growing up fluent in therapy-speak, back then Correll’s work – snippets of life’s low points rendered in affable doodles of red, white and black, often involving a snuggly pug – offered a new way to talk about mental health beyond what the self-serious self-help books had to say on the subject.
Today, nearly one million people still follow her work on Instagram. Her drawings are printed on greeting cards, an annual calendar, and T-shirts, and she’s illustrated several novels for multi-million bestseller Marian Keyes.
Correll chalks up her success to two things: honesty and relatability. “Everything I draw comes from personal experience,” she says over video call, looking every bit like the protagonist of her cartoons with the same full fringe and thick-rimmed spectacles. Certainly, I recognise her two squish-nosed pugs, Bean and Zander. “What I experience is not unique. A lot of people experience those things – and I think it can be a relief to see it depicted in a way that’s a bit light-hearted, to see that everything doesn’t have to be so doom and gloom all the time.”
That balance between Correll’s light touch and the weight of her subject matter is struck once again in her new memoir Anxietyland, which chronicles her ongoing health journey: depressive episodes, paralysing agoraphobia, obsessive compulsive disorder, alcoholism and beyond. Shuttling between a present-day mental health crisis and her memories of growing up as an anxiety-ridden child and later alcoholic teenager, it is a painfully honest read that remains, thanks to the images, surprisingly lighthearted and accessible.
In it, a panic attack is depicted as an endlessly looping rollercoaster; social anxiety is a House of Horrors stuffed with scaries from ordering food and eye contact to “simply existing in public”; work-life balance, meanwhile, is a game of whack-a-mole in which targets like money, happiness and time are forever just out of reach. The book is less metaphorical elsewhere, such as depicting Correll’s panicked call to a mental health crisis hotline where the operator suggested she just “sit back and relax with a cup of tea”.
Anxietyland has been 10 years in the making, and marks Correll’s first foray into long-form comics. It was the pandemic that finally gave her the space to finish it. Around that time, Correll’s popularity got a second wind online as the locked-down world, shuttered inside of our bedrooms and their minds, found solace in her cartoons. Friends would send Correll’s posts back and forth on social media – little SOS flares fired from the desert island of one lonely apartment to another. For many, it became a way to say “hey, I’m not doing so great” without the awkward long text message.
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It would have been helpful, Correll says, to have had a book like Anxietyland when she was growing up in Ipswich, Suffolk. “To know I wasn’t alone,” she says. “And also to see things in a way that I would understand as a kid. Obviously I didn’t know any of the technical medical terms, so to see an image of how I was feeling inside would have really helped. It also could have been something to show my parents to be like, ‘This describes how I feel even if I can’t actually articulate it.’”
Long-time fans of Correll will be glad to see that pugs feature heavily in her book. The snotty, snorting dogs have been a staple of her work since the very beginning. “You just can’t help but smile when you see a pug,” explains Correll, who is duly smiling at the two ones dozing by her feet. “I look at them and think this is how I should be living. They are so in the moment – they aren’t worrying about the future or what happened yesterday. All they’re worried about is what they’re going to eat next so, yes, I always try to be a bit more like them.”
Now in her fifth decade, Correll is still reckoning with the mental health problems she writes about in Anxietyland – one of the biggest takeaways from her book is how non-linear life can be. The final chapter sees the meeting of her present and younger selves. “Soooo, you don’t have the bad feeling any more? What did you do to make it go away?” asks her teenage self, to which the older Correll replies simply: “I didn’t.” At the end of the day, it’s not about leaving Anxietyland, it’s about learning to live there.
‘Anxietyland’ by Gemma Correll is out now, published by Particular Books
