Could Netflix’s Big Mouth Be Oversimplifying Mental Illness?
By: Till Kaeslin
Tags: Entertainment, Mental Health, Psychology, TV Series, Gratitude

Note: This article contains Big Mouth Season 4 spoilers.

Like many other people I know, I spent a good chunk of this weekend binging the entire newly released season of Big Mouth, an animated Netflix comedy about … puberty?

Well, maybe that definition isn’t giving the show enough credit.

Although Big Mouth does revolve around the life of tweens going through puberty, it also tackles topics surrounding relationships, sexual and gender identity, and mental health issues — which makes total sense, given that these are all things that come with growing up.

The show’s creators have brought anxiety and depression to life — literally.

More specifically, depression is “The Depression Kitty”, and she’s a giant purple cat that likes to pin you down and berate you with thoughts that are, well, depressing.

Anxiety is “Tito the Anxiety Mosquito” and to be honest, I kind of hate how accurately they brought anxiety to life as a character. Swarming the kids with his nervous energy and whispering anxious fears into their ears, Tito is truly the worst.

While these two foes have a good run on the show, one of their tormented victims, 13-year-old Jessi Glaser, learns to fight them off with “The Gratitoad”. No, that wasn’t a spelling error — gratitude is represented in the show by a talking toad (if you didn’t already sense that this show is all sorts of weird, here’s your cue to do so).

Although practicing expressing gratitude doesn’t get rid of Jessi’s depression and anxiety completely, they become fairly minimized (quite literally — in the season finale, we see the formerly massive depression kitty shrink down to the size of a cute little house cat).

So, combating depression and anxiety with gratitude — is this realistic?

Well, yes and no. While we can use grateful thinking to improve our relationships (both with ourselves and others), it’s unlikely to be the be-all and end-all of mental health cures.

A recent meta-analysis conducted on 27 individual studies dealing with gratitude and its effects on mental health, originally published in the Journal of Happiness Studies (summarized in a Healthline article here) points to clear limits in how much gratitude can really accomplish.

While the studies were conducted differently, they all shared one thing: participants were asked to perform some kind of gratitude exercise. Whether it was writing a grateful letter and reading it to the recipient or listing out all the things that went well in a day, those participating in the studies (3,675 people in total) were all asked to practice gratitude.

After the experiments were up, psychologists analyzed the effect of these different gratitude exercises on the participants’ mental health — specifically as it pertained to their symptoms of depression and anxiety.

In short: The effects were insignificant.

As an article on Science Daily summarizes the results: “Go ahead and be grateful for the good things in your life. Just don’t think that a gratitude intervention will help you feel less depressed or anxious.”

This doesn’t mean that practicing gratitude can’t be impactful on your mindset and your relationships, just that it isn’t a viable treatment for depression and anxiety on its own (nor is it a viable replacement for proven treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy).

So what does this say about Big Mouth and The Gratitoad? How about media representation of mental health issues in general?

I’d say it remains to be seen.

The way I see it, the creators of the show didn’t make it seem like Jessi had entirely defeated her depression and anxiety through working with The Gratitoad, only that she had minimized them.

It’s how they’ll choose to move forward with her story in the next season that will really show how they view mental health issues. In my opinion, I think they gave us a hint of Jessi’s depression coming back with the return of the depression kitty in the final minutes of the season finale (albeit a smaller, less-threatening version of her).

Big Mouth has already made mental health-representation history — now let’s hope they don’t fuck it up.

Not a lot of shows have tried to tackle the progression of mental health issues like Big Mouth has — not with children in their early teens, and certainly not with animation to give these ethereal concepts more digestible names and faces.

In a weird way, this infamously uncensored, whacky, over-the-top cartoon has done a lot more for the on-screen representation of mental illness than many of its more “serious” counterparts.

But the creators of this show are walking a very fine line — the line between the benefit of making these concepts digestible and the danger of oversimplifying mental illness to the point of belittling it.

I never thought I’d say this, but for the sake of accurate representation, I hope the depression kitty and anxiety mosquito have some fight left in them in season five.