It’s that time of year again! Welcome back to The Twelve Days of Anime. Popularized by Scamp of The Cart Driver, Twelve Days of Anime is a blogging meme in which we revisit twelve memorable moments from a year’s worth of anime watching around the holidays.

Last year, I diligently did all twelve days, but I didn’t really give my posts a place to live, which is a shame since I worked really hard on each of them. So I’m turning this post, on Twelve Days of Anime Eve, into a master table of contents. Watch this space!

Twelve Days of Anime 2014

Dec. 14 — Why Kill La Kill won’t be a gateway show

Dec. 15 — Shirobako, dreams, and goals

Dec. 16 — How sports anime made me more of myself

Dec. 17 — My Yowamushi Pedal confession

Dec. 18 — When anime sucks

Dec. 19 — Anime comfort food

Dec. 20 — Gundam Gundam Gundam

Dec. 21 — My favorite shows of 2014

Dec. 22 — My favorite female characters of 2014

Dec. 23 — My favorite male characters of 2014

Dec. 24 — A very special Christmas special

Dec. 25 — Another year of anime

Twelve Days of Anime 2013

Dec. 14 — How The Devil is a Part-Timer got me back to work

Dec. 15 — On watching Free! with straight men

Dec. 16 — Everybody loves Madarame

Dec. 17 — My little Kuroneko can’t pander like this!

Dec. 18 — Psycho Pass is a Dickian dystopia

Dec. 19 — Watamote and the awkward stage I don’t remember

Dec. 20 — My top five anime songs in 2013

Dec. 21 — My five favorite anime in 2013

Dec. 22 — My favorite female characters of 2013

Dec. 23 — My favorite male characters of 2013

Dec. 24 — Attack on Titan as a gateway drug

Dec. 25 — Burnout, what burnout? A year in anime consumption

Screenshot via Denki-gai no Honya-san

This blog post originally ran on Manga Therapy in May. As I make my year-end assessment of my best writing of 2014, I keep coming back to this post and thought it needed to live on my site, too. I hope it will be just as helpful a second time.

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“Maybe you should toughen up and stop wallowing in bed.”

You wouldn’t say the above sentence to somebody with a broken leg. So why is it acceptable to say to somebody with an equally real disease, depression?

Mental illness has long been misunderstood because its symptoms aren’t always visible to outsiders. Leave it to anime to bring those symptoms to a highly visible surface.

Tony and I have talked before about how anime can clarify human behavior for people who usually have trouble comprehending it. There have been no formal studies on the topic, so I can’t speak authoritatively that this is the case.

Whether intentional or not, anime makes people easier to understand. Exaggerated facial expressions demystify internal feelings. Bright hair colors make it easy to differentiate different characters even for people who have trouble with facial recognition.

I’ve insisted to Tony that in the same way, anime has the potential to unshroud mental illness. I think that’s one way to interpret the plot of Mushi-shi—as mental illness taking physical form.

In Mushi-shi, a doctor and storyteller named Ginko travels around rural Japan witnessing unusual phenomena which he calls mushi, a word for “insects” that here may also mean “spirits.” When humans and mushi interact, things can and do often go awry.

The funny thing is, the mushi surface peoples’ mental struggles. A man mourning his sister is enchanted by mushi so he is literally unable to feel. A jilted lover literally begins to fade away after she has her heart broken. Every time, Ginko’s medicine is the same: the person must recognize the problem inside herself in order to overcome it.

It’s certainly not that easy to cure mental illness, but the message is the same. Mushi-shi is simply showing people’s mental anguish on the outside. The inner world is still where the trouble is. Supporters can do their best to help, but the real battle is inside the person.

Mushi-shi shows people who deal with much the same mental problems as people in real life—grief, heartbreak—and give these illnesses visible physical characteristics. But just because, in real life, we don’t show these symptoms on the outside, we experience them just the same.

The next time a friend or loved one is going through a tough time, think about Mushi-shi. You can’t see their struggle but it’s there inside them. And the best gift you can give to a person suffering from mental anguish is to trust them that what they’re feeling is real.