Author of "Pictures for Sad Children" admits to faking depression for money

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/73258510/sad-pictures-for-children/posts/311890

So disappointed and hurt by this...i've given this guy money before, too, and bought his stuff. :\

edit: I just noticed that he has stuff sold out of Topatoco, where Gaslamp has some of their merch. Suffice to say, I'm not buying anything from Topatoco, period, until they remove him. It would be an insult to myself and a lot of people I care deeply for. Some people are already sending emails and messages asking them to, also.

 

A guy is faking depression, and you're unhappy about that? What? You do understand what the alternative to faking it is, yes?

Come on now. How is that at all disappointing.

 

The alternative would have been him not being depressed at all and not taking the money of strangers moved by his plight.

The negation of faking depression isn't being depressed, because there's not just [faking depression] and [depressed] - you could best describe it as a table of [depressed/not depressed] on both sides, where 1 represents appearance and the other reality.
So, for example:

| D | ND |
D | 1 | 0 | would be an obviously depressed depressed person
ND| 0 | 0 |

while


| D | ND |
D | 0 | 0 | would be the classic portrayal of a depressed person hiding their mental state
ND| 1 | 0 |

| D | ND |
D | 0 | 1 | would be a filthy lying con man
ND| 0 | 0 |

and

| D | ND |
D | 0 | 0 | would be what he should have been doing instead of profiting off of people's sympathy.
ND| 0 | 1 |

 

Faking depression for money is up there for me with begging for the same when you can make yourself useful and work. If you can't do anything else, I can donate some money to you. Lazy people (not the genuinely helpless) who beg to make money should be chucked into a poorhouse and forced to make a living. TL;DR

 

Look at the previous post: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/73258510/sad-pictures-for-children/posts/268510

 

Still doesn't change the fact that either A) He's making funny haha out of a pretty serious topic, again, for moolah, or B) is scum of the earth.

 

yeah i liken it to faking cancer (depression can also be pretty life threatening) and asking for donations. it is just sad to me. and very disappointing.

 

People simply don't like being lied to. I can totally understand the response.

 

I want this jerk to be depressed. Or dead even. What a jerk...

Depression is nothing to abuse like this guy does. It can be minor, or it can be what leads people tho kill themselves. That is why it should never be faked. This is similar to those swine who pretend to be abused so they can get sympathy. I remember a woman who was always getting people to help her with things because she was "scared her abusive husband would beat her" for whatever it was.

She had a local Church helping her in a dozen ways, including but not limited to mowing her lawn for free and helping her pay her bills. (Not giving her cash. Just helping her get to the bank and post office when she needed to.)

She was infact unmarried, and had no relationship at all. It was a scam she used to gain sympathy. And it is fucking insulting to the people who actually are abused and need the sympathy and support others freely offer.

Jerks like that may well deserve what they pretend to suffer from so they could understand the lasting harm they do to the world. The kids that took turns mowing her lawn would never again be so willing to help someone. They had already been burned by her.

 

Unless a person either suffers from a disorder like clinical depression or someone in there family suffers from it, then it's unusual for that person to grasp the reality of it. I'm sure that this is the case for the jerk you are talking about. People don't always talk about it, because A) there is a stigma attached to any kind of mental illness, and B) people just don't want to deal with the reactions that they expect to get from talking about it (because some people are simply idiots or jerks or just ignorant)

 

Funny you should mention that, just came across this on the Youtubes yesterday.

 

Why do I get the feeling that people like this deserve to be torn apart in Diggle Hell? Or for that matter, be just plain torn apart? I'm getting really tired of listening to this sort of thing take place, it's a circus.

I am an angry man btw, if you haven't noticed.

 

Everybody sucks, let's run away and become hermits living in Dredmor's dungeon.

 

Nothing wrong with being angry. If no one got angry at injustice and antics, the world would be in a lot worse shape than it is today.

That actually isn't so bad an idea when you think about it.

 

I'd second this, since Brax is at least reasonable to his customers. If all else fails I can always take over the dungeon and use it to do good.

 

I think everyone is seriously taking this out of context.

He never claimed to be depressed in the hopes of getting sympathy. Even if you take the Kickstarter post as being entirely serious, all he is saying is that he tried to keep a depressed mindset so that the comics he drew would appear to be drawn by a "depressed artist" which he thought people would like more. So what he is apologising for is the pretence he put upon his art-work, which he believe ultimately increased his profits. Or, to put it another way, he acted differently around other people in the hopes it would make him more popular.

That is absolutely nothing like pretending your husband has died.

Of course, that is just the most literal interpretation.

Here's another possibility, what if he is actually depressed. Well, one thing depression does to a person is make them believe that they are worth less than others, and that their problems are less important, problems such as their depression.
Depression can very much make people say things like "I haven't got a medical condition, I'm just a bit down in the dumps, there are people out there with cancer. I know it seems bad at times, but really I'm just putting it on to get sympathy." People with depression will sometimes even outright lie and act happy, just so that people won't give them the sympathy they believe they don't deserve.

If that's the case, then you're all ridiculing and attacking a man with a serious medical condition because of one of the symptoms of that condition.

But there is a third option, one which I personally think is most likely.
Look at this quote from the Kickstarter post:

"I got more and more exhausted with acting unhappy and withdrew from the majority of my friends. I spent a great deal of time alone and extremely happy,"

I mean, really... You all read that and thought he was being serious? Those aren't the words so someone who was pretending to be depressed. No-one spends all day pretending to have horrible feeling and then goes home to be really happy about. That's just not how emotions work. If you pretend to be sad it actually makes you sad. Emotions aren't just random, they come from what you think and do. If you're pretending to be depressed then you're thinking about the way a depressed person would act, and about what a depressed person would think. If you spend the whole day like that, then you're not going to go home and "spend a great deal of time alone and extremely happy". It just doesn't work like that.
On the other hand, it is precisely the sort of thing someone might say if they were writing satirically (or, possibly, as I said before, if they were lying about their feelings).

Aren't we better people than to judge a man so quickly and on so little?

 

Nope.

 

I've already discussed this at length on other websites, so I'll quickly summarize-- if his post is meant to be satirical or sarcastic, then he does a very bad job of it. Successful satire functions by clueing in the intended audience by using several common techniques:

• A writing voice that is unlike the expected one (ex: The Onion using curse words as a "news" organization)
• A stance that is so unbelievable that it's obviously not legitimate (ex: A Modest Proposal's suggestion of cannibalism)
• A stance that is clear
• A exaggeration/hyperbole of details to create a sense of disbelief
• A political or social message that is clear (usually the opposite of what the piece is supposed to be supporting)
• The satire's true message (the opposite of what it says at face value) should generally agree with the people you are trying to defend or help, and attack the people who are being jerks.
• Some content that is funny

You don't have to have all of these, but you should at least have a few. Without these elements, it becomes indistinguishable from an editorial with a serious stance.

Unfortunately, his post does none of these things. It's especially crappy because there is actually a sizable chunk of people out there who believe that depression is fake. Quite a few people get hurt by this belief. And there really isn't much room for excuses because he has been making his webcomic for several years now, and he's extremely popular, so he should be well aware of how people perceive his work (not to mention he's mentioned having depression before).

If it's supposed to be satire, it's bad. If it's actually serious, it's also bad. What he did is just not okay.

He talks about being tired of having to fake depression, so it makes sense in that context. It's not necessarily clear as an exaggeration-- obviously if you're surrounded by sad people all day, you'd be happy to finally be alone at the end of it.

 

It's just a trend I've seen growing more and more across the world these days. Not sure if you guys agree, but people these days keep setting themselves up as victims. After all, being a victim is great - you get sympathy, you get loot, people who criticise you are shunned and shouted down, etc, etc. The situation is supposed to be temporary - after all, who would go through so much pain and suffering just to gain victim status?

Until you realise that there are people who fake victimhood in order to get all this stuff, and there are even those who do it routinely.