It's Kind of a Funny Story

Title: It's Kind of a Funny Story
Author: Ned Vizzini
ISBN: 078685197X

Plot Summary: Craig Gilner, a middle-class teenager from Brooklyn, feels lucky when he is accepted into a prestigious New York public high school. However, once he gets in, he is soon overwhelmed by academic pressure, and starts self-medicating with drugs and purging to handle the stress until his parents agree to send him to a therapist. The therapist prescribes anti-depressants, but Craig decides to stop taking them, and soon becomes suicidally depressed. At a loss, he checks himself into a mental hospital with his parents' blessing, hoping this will help him deal with his issues. While there, he meets a variety of different people, each with their own issues, and comes to gain new insight on himself in the process.


Critical Evaluation: Craig is relatively fortunate in his brush with mental illness: his stay in the hospital is brief and productive; his condition responds well to medication and talk therapy; and his parents are willing and able to support him both emotionally and financially. Vizzini, who based the book on personal experience, does not take himself too seriously in this respect. He relates his experiences with the other patients with humor, but does not reduce them to caricatures, and although the main female character acts as his love interest, she too is given a complete personality. That said, it is worth noting that Vizzini was hospitalized for depression during college, not high school; the difference in maturity levels, including with regard to depression, is often a significant one. Not all brushes with depression end as successfully as Craig's; the strength of this book lies not only in recognizing this, but in destigmatizing mental illness as merely a disease to be treated, and not a source of shame to be kept under wraps.

Reader's Annotation: Craig is thrilled to be accepted into a prestigious, academically challenging New York public high school - until the academic pressure overwhelms him to the point of considering suicide. After checking himself into a local mental hospital, he meets a diverse and quirky cast of characters, each with their own problems, and ends up gaining insight into his own.

About the Author: Ned Vizzini was born in 1981 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York. While attending Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, he started writing articles for the New York Press; these articles were later collected in the book Teen Angst? Naaaaah.... He attended Hunter College, and was briefly hospitalized for suicidal depression in 2004, an experience he later fictionalized in It's Kind of a Funny Story, soon to be released as a motion picture. He lives and writes in Manhattan, where he frequently speaks about his work.

Genre: Fiction: Suicide

Curriculum Ties: Health and Wellness, Psychology

Booktalking Ideas:

Hook: Craig's initial methods for coping with anxiety and depression
Approach: Character and plot-based.
Ideas for Booktalk: Discussion of Craig's symptoms: cycling, vomiting, constant worry. Introduced to pot by a friend; many people with mental and emotional illnesses self-medicate. Why? How, if at all, does it help? Stops continuing to help after a while. When Craig gets professional help, he decides to stop taking his medication. Discuss why he does this, possibly with added discussion of stigma attached to mental illness. His parents help out financially, but many health insurers will only cover medication, not talk therapy. At what point does Craig decide that everything he has tried up to this point is not working?

Hook: Craig, in the throes of suicidal depression, walks to the nearest hospital.
Approach: Scene-based.
Ideas for Booktalk: Walks instead of getting a ride, taking public transit, asking his parents to drive him, etc. Discuss motivations behind the decision to walk to the hospital, what has brought him to this point, why he picks the hospital he does and what he tells the admitting doctor when he arrives. Many suicidal people "take a walk" and don't come back.What makes Craig act otherwise?

Reading Level/Interest Age: Grades 9+

Challenge Issues: Suicide, sexual content, drug use, offensive language.
The teenagers in this book experiment with sex and drugs as a matter of course, and the narrator is not above his own sexual longings. However, it is worth noting that drugs, both legal and illegal, dissatisfy Craig as depression alleviators, and although they are presented as "normal," they are not presented as the best, or even only, solution to his problems. The narrator's language, while sometimes profane, is generally no more so than any other boy his age.
The question of suicide and of suicidal behavior is somewhat trickier. Craig's depression appears to be situational, brought on by academic stress, whereas some depression sufferers have the condition organically, feeling as Craig does regardless of external circumstances. While there may be some who object to the questions of suicide and mental illness being discussed at all, still others may argue that the book does not go far enough, presenting a relatively mild case in Craig. To the first group, I would remind them of the importance of the issue of teen suicide, and for depressed teens to have access to materials letting them know they are not alone in their feelings. As for the second, Craig interacts with many others who are far worse off than he, including his love interest, who injured herself prior to entering the hospital. In both cases, I feel any book that helps to remove the stigma of mental illness in general, and suicidal depression in particular, is one that needs to be available to young adult patrons.


Why I Chose This Book: Having dealt with my own mental and emotional issues, it was refreshing to see a novel that dealt with these issues with both insight and humor, particularly from a young person's perspective. The question of suicide and suicidal behavior is taken more seriously than it used to be; however, both those who suffer from it and their loved ones still feel a great deal of shame, as though the condition is somehow their fault. By taking his narrator's experience seriously and humorously at the same time, Vizzini not only demonstrates empathy for all those who suffer from mental diseases, but also gives hope that they can eventually start to get better.