The webcomics blog about webcomics

You Can Do Good

First, watch this.

Second, tell people you know to watch this.

Third, maybe drop a line to George Rohac and tell him he’s a goddamn hero.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that You Can Do Good has the potential to become the next It Gets Better, and it’s important for all the same reasons. You heard the man: I figured I’d go first. First in saying mental illness challenges me, but it’s not who I am; I’m more than what my mind tries to shoehorn me into being; I can prevail over this, and so can you.

It’s a cliche that greatly creative people have a touch of madness about them; it’s a truth-fact that in the eight or nine years I’ve spent getting to know webcomics creators, I’ve met more people with various diagnoses and medications to help control psychiatric conditions than I’d ever known in the first 35 years in my life. Could be because they’re mostly younger than I am, and were more likely to be diagnosed that people my age; could be they’re just more willing to talk about mental illness and a huge number of my contemporaries are in the psychiatric closet.

What I can tell you is, this move to destigmatize mental illness can only help things; I literally watched George’s video for the first time last night five seconds before my EMS pager summoned me to help the second patient in three hours having a psychiatric crisis. Undiagnosed, untreated, unacknowledged, these conditions eat away at lives and leave people damaged to the point of ruin. Getting help¹, not letting shame or contempt prevent that help — so many lives can be improved and saved.

Like I said — a goddamn hero, and all of his considerable contributions to comics aren’t as important as what he’s started. We can all do good; get doing.

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¹ Which in large part is going to require us all to demand that those who need help have realistic means of getting it.

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