The Portrayal of Depression and Anxiety in Corina Dascălu’s Mama mea e un nuștiuce haizisăizic (2025) and Myo Maclear’s Virginia Wolf (2012)

This paper explores the representation of anxiety and depression in two contemporary graphic novels, analyzing how the combination of visual and textual storytelling offers powerful tools for expressing internal psychological states. Through the close reading of Corina Dascălu’s Mama mea e un nuștiuce haisăizic (2025) and Kyo Maclear’s Virginia Woolf (2012), we seek to discover how graphic narratives describe the experiences of mental illness, including the symptoms, social alienation, and the very nature of anxiety and depression. Graphic novels frequently use visual metaphors, panel structure, and color schemes to represent emotional turbulence and disorientation, making the invisible symptoms of mental illness tangible and relatable. The interplay between fragmented narration and distorted imagery mirrors the fractured self-perception common to these disorders, allowing readers to engage empathetically with characters’ internal worlds. Such graphic novels allow readers to discover some features of mental illnesses, being a powerful tool for medical students to discover some ways to explore these facets of the human mind. Therefore, we may say that graphic novels that are so popular today, may contribute meaningfully to the discourse on mental health, enabling readers to discover more about some topics that have been constantly avoided in our society.