Although parts of the book are darkly humorous, as the title suggests, Ned Vizzini’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story is ultimately a realistic, grounded portrayal of life inside a psychiatric hospital. At the beginning of the story, narrator Craig doesn’t understand why he often feels bad and unlike the other kids around him. However, with the help of medical professionals, fellow patients, and his friends and family, Craig begins to get a better idea of where his own mental health symptoms come from and how to manage them. Although Craig’s sister, Sarah, compares Craig’s psychiatric hospital to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (a novel from the 1960s that portrays a mental health institute as a prison), Vizzini’s novel deliberately challenges negative stereotypes attached to mental health and psychiatric facilities, attempting to portray both patients and the hospital staff as fully rounded characters who experience normal, human challenges of daily life.
Craig first realizes how deep his depression is when he starts making plans to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. This leads to him calling a suicide hotline and eventually checking himself in to a nearby emergency room. Craig learns to think about his mental health in terms of Tentacles and Anchors—terms he coins to describe unwanted tasks that get in his way, and things that help him feel better, respectively. During his time in the psychiatric hospital, Craig learns that he has the power to change his life (for example, by making art or transferring high schools) but he also learns that sometimes he has to trust other people and follow their instructions (such as following the prescriptions that his doctors recommend). It’s Kind of a Funny Story challenges stereotypes about mental health and dramatizes the day-to-day process of managing depression. In so doing, it helps readers to better understand their own mental health struggles or those of people around them.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Mental Health ThemeTracker
Mental Health Quotes in It’s Kind of a Funny Story
It’s so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That’s above and beyond everything else, and it’s not a mental complaint—it’s a physical thing, like it’s physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don’t come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people’s words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.
She got me some thick paper—white construction paper. Later on I grew to prefer straight computer paper. I went back under my fort and turned the light on and started on my first map. And I did that for the next five years—whenever I was in class, I didn’t doodle, I drew maps. Hundreds of them. When I finished, I crumpled them; it was making them that was important. I did cities on the ocean, cities with two rivers meeting in the middle, cities with one big river that bent, cities with bridges, crazy interchanges, circles and boulevards. I made cities. That made me happy. That was my Anchor. And until I turned nine and turned to video games, that was what I wanted to be when I grew up: a mapmaker.
The Shift is coming. The Shift has to be coming. Because if you keep on living like this you’ll die.
I had a sudden urge to walk out over the trussing and lean over the water, to declare myself to the world. Once it came into my head, I couldn’t push it away.
What was I doing taking pills? I had just had a little problem and freaked out and needed some time to adjust. Anyone could have a problem starting a new school. I probably never needed to go to a doctor in the first place. What, because I threw up? I wasn’t throwing up anymore. Some days I wouldn’t eat, but back in Biblical times people did that all the time—fasting was a big part of religion, Mom told me. We were already so fat in America; did I need to be part of the problem?
“He’s always talking about himself and his problems. Like you. You’re both self-centered. Only, you have a low opinion of yourself, so it’s tolerable. He has a really high opinion of himself. It’s a pain.”
It’s a pain in the ass to find those government listings. I thought they were marked with green pages, but the green pages turn out to be a restaurant guide. The government listings are in blue at the front, but it’s all phone numbers for where to get your car if it’s towed, what to do if your block has a rat problem . . . Ah, here, health. Poison control, emergency, mental health. There are a bunch of numbers. The first one says “suicide” near it. It’s a local number, and I call.
“This is the most life-affirming thing you’ve ever done. You made the right decision. I love you. You’re my only son and I love you. Please remember.”
Oh my God, it hits. I’m in the mental ward.
“Life is not cured, Mr. Gilner.” Dr. Mahmoud leans in. “Life is managed.”
“Okay.”
I’m apparently not as impressed by this as he would like.
“I have to have surgery to clear them up. You think I should?”
“No. Why hide what you’ve been through?”
“I don’t know if that’s really a question. It’s too obvious. Wouldn’t I be happier without scars?”
“I don’t know. It’s tough to tell what would make you happy. I thought I’d be happier in a really tough high school, and I ended up here.”
It’s depressing, though. I mean, this room is what I expect a mental hospital to look like. Adults reduced to children, sitting with finger paints; a jolly supervisor telling them that everything they do is great.
“You don’t want any of your Anchors being members of the opposite sex you’re attracted to,” Dr. Minerva says. “Relationships change even more than people. It’s like two people changing. It’s exponentially more volatile. Especially two teenagers.”
“Ha! Listen, for real, here’s my card.” Neil pulls out a simple black-and-white business card that identifies him as a Guitar Therapist. “Whenever you’re out of here, and I’m sure it’ll be soon, give me a call and we can talk about volunteering, and—I’m serious—I might like to buy some of these.”
“You were the one who suggested I do stuff from childhood,” I continue. “I used to do these when I was a kid, and I forgot how fun they were.”
“So now,” I continue, “instead of a quarter-life crisis they’ve got a fifth-life crisis—that’s when you’re eighteen—and a sixth-life crisis—that’s when you’re fourteen. I think that’s what a lot of people have.”
“What you have.”
“Not just me. It’s the . . . um . . . should I keep going?”
“Yes,” Noelle says.
“Well, there are lot of people who make a lot of money off the fifth- and sixth-life crises. All of a sudden they have a ton of consumers scared out of their minds and willing to buy facial cream, designer jeans, SAT test prep courses, condoms, cars, scooters, self-help books, watches, wallets, stocks, whatever … all the crap that the twenty-somethings used to buy, they now have the ten-somethings buying. They doubled their market!”
“I’m going to throw a wild notion at you.” Dr. Minerva leans back, then forward. “Have you ever thought about going to a different school?”
I’m not better, you know. The weight hasn’t left my head. I feel how easily I could fall back into it, lie down and not eat, waste my time and curse wasting my time, look at my homework and freak out and go and chill at Aaron’s, look at Nia and be jealous again, take the subway home and hope that it has an accident, go and get my bike and head to the Brooklyn Bridge. All of that is still there. The only thing is, it’s not an option now. It’s just… a possibility, like it’s a possibility that I could turn to dust in the next instant and be disseminated throughout the universe as an omniscient consciousness. It’s not a very likely possibility.
So now live for real, Craig. Live. Live. Live. Live.
Live.
