Charlie Brown Mental Disorder

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Mac WoldProfessor Stacy Reuille DupontPsych 157-910 November 2017The classic TV and comic strip series, The Peanuts is well known and recognized by nearly everyone. The series focuses on a social circle of young children and typically spotlights one of these children, Charlie Brown. With his yellow zig-zagged shirt and seemingly bald head, Charlie Brown is an iconic and well-loved character, but could there be more to him than meets the eye? Throughout the series, there is an abundance of psychological and philosophical undertones, especially illustrated through Charlie Brown. Constantly showing signs of mental illness such as depression, anxiety, and over analysis issues, Charlie Brown is an ideal character to study

There is one notable comic strip where Charlie Brown is seen slouching, calling it his, “depressed stance.” He then goes on to tell another character that, “If you’re going to get any joy out of being depressed, you’ve got to stand like this.” In this example, Charlie illustrates that his depression doesn’t really seem to bother him. Being comfortable with your own sadness and overall dissatisfaction with life is a clear sign that someone is depressed. On several other occasions in the series, we also see Charlie talking about being lonely, and how he believes no one likes him. The next clear mental illness shown through Charlie Brown is anxiety. He is often seen worrying and stressing over things that most young kids would never worry about. In one comic strip, Charlie even says, “my anxieties have anxieties.” Throughout the early shows and comics, Charlie has an interest in a little red haired girl at school. There is a variety of instances where he is shown daydreaming, wishing that he could talk to her. The fact that he never actually builds up the confidence to talk to her shows that he is most likely dealing with social anxieties. His worries and self doubts constantly seem to be holding him back from this social interaction. Charlie says that he always tends to, “replace one worry with another.” Besides Charlie Brown’s obvious struggles with depression and anxiety, there are a handful of

This causes him to constantly avoid social situations. These are clear signs of APD, or avoidant personality disorder. Much like Charlie Brown, depression and anxiety are things I struggle with personally in my everyday life. When I first started experiencing symptoms of my own depression and anxiety disorders years ago, I remember seeing a Peanuts cartoon and really relating to it. In this particular cartoon, Charlie Brown was saying that he feels afraid to be happy, because when you’re happy something bad always happens. This really resonated with me because it was as if Charlie had perfectly explained how I often felt. The more I looked into Charlie Brown’s depression and anxiety problems, the more similarities I saw to my own. Charlie and I both tend to get sad for no good reason, question our existences constantly, and get too anxious to engage in social situations. Although The Peanuts may seem like an innocent and playful cartoon to most, it certainly contains an abundance of psychological allusion, and does a great job of it. After doing fairly extensive research on the topics, and even experiencing them for myself, I can confidently say that Charlie Brown is an excellent embodiment of how it can be to feel depressed and