The Mana Theory. A gamer-friendly analogy for understanding and describing mental illness and executive dysfunction.
In some games, the charater you play has a mana bar. [img shows an arrow pointing from previous text to an illustration of a green Health bar labeled HP and a blue Mana bar labeled Mana. Below the bar, there is an illustration of a wizard holding a staff and shooting a fireball.] it's a magical reserver of power that you can spend on tasks... like shooting massive fireballs.
If we apply this to life and everyone has a mana bar, it might look like this: [img: wizard in cyan saying 'hello. i am mentally healthly.' with a full hp and mana bar. wizard in magenta saying 'hello. i have a mental illness.' with a full hp bar and a reduced mana bar with caption showing red lines that illustrate the cost of illness]
Most mentally healthy people operate with a full bar. Each task as a base cost. [img: brush teeth costs 5, get out of bed costs 10, walk the dog costs 15, go to work costs 30, shoot fireball costs 50, pay bills costs 10, make dinner costs 20, fight cthulhu costs 100.] and to do that task, yo umust spend that much mana.
someone with a mental illness has the same base cost, but have additional debuffs like a tax, that require you to spend more per task to complete it. [img: brush teeth now costs 10, get out of bed now costs 15, walking the dog now costs 20, go to work now costs 60, shoot fireball now costs 100, pay bills now costs 20, make dinner now costs 45, and fight cthulhu costs 9001]
The debuff amount is unique for each person and can vay depending on the tasks
and the debuff can change from week to week, or even day to day
and there are all sorts of debuffs, such as starting with less mana, an passive mana drain even if you aren't doing anything, fatige, and more, and they can stack up
this can lead to the impossible task where one randome task is now prohibited. this could be as 'simple' as making a phone call or going to the post office.
debuffs can also affect the physical body, such as migraines or stomach aches, which can illustrated on the HP bar
all of this together can lead to a breakdown of executive function and some tasks stop getting done, others change, morphing into a more doable or simpler task like brushing teeth is now using mouth wash or making dinner is ordering delivery.
This analogy offers a common language to talk and communciate with each other about mental illness without the need to get into the specific defailts of why
When a task is insurmountable: 'we're going out, wanna come?' you can say, 'no thanks, I have insufficient mana.'
and when there is a lot going on: 'what's wrong?' you can answer, 'I've got a lot of debuffs'.
I'm out of mana.

This is my first time ever trying to draw characters AND comics.