I'VE BEEN PRETENDING TO BE DEPRESSED FOR PROFIT AND I'M SORRY

<John Campbell

It seemed hard at first to fake depression, due to the amount of energy involved. I could not do it for long. By the time I got comfortable with it I found it necessary to allow this deception to extend into my private life. I believed one or more stories of myself as "pretending to be depressed" could have distanced me from my chosen demographic.

My most prominent regret is not deceiving people and taking their money, and it's not helping depressed people perpetuate their negative thought loops via replication and display. I regret the borderline people, those who could identify the problems in their life, face them, and allow themselves to be changed, but instead found it necessary to conceive of themselves as "struggling with depression" rather than being genuinely held back emotionally by some nasty and real situation. Any work participating in the "culture of depression" has probably contributed to these sad and unnecessary cases.

I've done a lot of soul-searching and now believe it is my calling to be the first "artist" to admit to an audience "I've been pretending to be depressed." I've spoken with a handful of others who are interested to see where this experiment goes. As far as any of us can remember, no one's tried coming clean about this.

At an early age I noticed a large number of artists and authors seemed depressed, so I imitated them. It is natural to imitate the people around you, even if "around you" primarily means the people you read and watch on television or in movies. This is "around you" in a spiritual sense.

There seems to be a sense that "something is wrong" and as you fake this sense, and investigate it more deeply in order to fake it better, you begin to suspect that sense is the thing that is wrong. There are a great deal of things in the universe and most if not all of them are going somewhere else and becoming different things. So the feeling that everything is "not as it should be" is both accurate and appropriate. Things will be different soon.

The more I got to know artists, the more I desired to have confirmation from them, via communication of any kind, that they were also pretending to be depressed. Not for confirmation that this was the state of things (because I know that it is) but for admission into their inner circle of relationships. This is the most honest two creatively inclined people can be with one another, to admit to each other that emotion and perception are rides that you go on, and the actual "you" is experiencing these rides from an enjoyable perspective.

The more people I knew who refused to admit to me they were faking their depression, the more confused I got. Was I communicating incorrectly? Did they believe that I was the one who was failing to communicate that I was faking depression, was I confusing them? 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, making art suggesting otherwise in order to attract others who were also pretending to be what I was faking.

Each of my comics can be read from a "depressed" perspective and from a "non-depressed" (i.e. healthy, self-aware and loving) perspective. From this perspective each of my comics suggests and defends the notion that depression is not a "real" experience, but one of many non-real experiences that are culturally and socially enforced by language and the apparent limits we place on our own perceptions.

I am extremely sorry about this and I hope you will forgive me.

My new book will be available before the end of the year and I hope you like it. Your rewards will come to you around the same time as the book. I will send out a request for updated addresses from everyone when the book is close to being sent out. Thank you for your continuing patience and understanding.

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