Father-daughter duo writes comic book about teen mental health (Exclusive)

• Ethan Sacks is a writer. Star Wars The author of Comic Book and other Marvel comics wanted to create a superhero for his teenage daughter Naomi, who was going through a mental crisis.
• Together, Ethan and Naomi wrote a comic series inspired by Naomi’s experiences.
• A book version of a four-part series. Ghost-possessed girlis now public and contains mental health resources to help others

Ethan Sachs sat feeling guilty and scared in the cafeteria of New York City’s Bellevue Hospital in March 2019. His 15-year-old daughter, Naomi, was hospitalized in the pediatric psychiatry ward upstairs, suffering from severe depression and suicidal thoughts, and Sachs felt guilty.

“If only I’d been a better parent, maybe I’d realized sooner and been able to help her,” he recalled thinking. He and his wife, Masako, a bank manager, “were totally overwhelmed,” Sachs said. “We were thinking, ‘What do we do now?'”

Manga artist and former Daily News He pulled out an old journalism notebook and stared at the blank page. “I wanted to come up with a story that would make Naomi want to live,” Ethan, 51, said. He scribbled a sentence into his notebook: “The girl who doesn’t know if she wants to live is the only thing that can save all life on Earth.”

Over the next few years, that initial idea became a labor of love for Ethan and Naomi, now 20. Ghost-possessed girl Co-written by the father-daughter team and illustrated by Sax collaborator Marco Lorenzana, the comic is a supernatural horror tale about teenage heroine Cleo, who navigates her life after a suicide attempt and battles a demonic apocalypse that only she can prevent.

“We hope that this experience will be empowering for Naomi,” said Marvel and co-founder and CEO, Ian McGrath. “We hope that this experience will be empowering for Naomi, as she will be able to continue to lead a life of healing.” Star Wars Comics. “If I can reach people through my books and help them, that’s a plus.”

Ghost-possessed girl “It does involve supernatural events, but it’s also a real story that a lot of kids experience,” says Brett Wean, director of writing and entertainment outreach for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, who consulted on the comic. “It feels authentic and positive.”

Cleo’s story parallels that of Naomi, a hospitalized teenager when she was a freshman at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. After years of struggling with anxiety, Naomi began experiencing symptoms of depression. “Everything felt gray and it was hard to envision the future,” she says. “I didn’t think things were going to get better.”

After the school learned Naomi had been telling friends about “dreams” about suicide, a school social worker called her parents. “They said, ‘We need you to come and get your daughter. We can’t let her go alone. She’s suicidal,'” Ethan recalls. “We were in uncharted territory.” That was the beginning of what would amount to more than five weeks in hospital, followed by several months of outpatient treatment.

As Naomi began to recover with treatment and medication, Ethan simply
Write a story for He needed her help in telling his daughter about it. “I thought it would be cathartic for her, but she has a certain authenticity that I don’t have,” Ethan says. “I thought that together we could help her better than I could on my own.”

Naomi’s input made Cleo a more realistic hero. “I wanted her to feel a bit of misery, because I’d felt misery myself,” Naomi says. “We wanted to make her relatable and show that things can get better.”

That’s an important message for others who suffer, says Dr. Vasilis Pozios of the American Psychiatric Association, another adviser to the book. “The book treats mental illness like a physical health condition – as a controllable disease, like diabetes, high blood pressure or high cholesterol,” he says. “With the right treatment, people can live the life they want.”

Naomi’s own experience allowed her to add realistic details to the story, like the focus techniques Cleo learns in dialectical behavior therapy to calm herself. She also added some of the quirks of the psychiatric ward. “One thing I particularly wanted to include were the paper spoons in the hospital,” Naomi says. “During my second stay there, people had tried to self-harm with plastic utensils, so we could only use paper spoons. It didn’t work. A lot of us had given up and [ate] In our hands!

Naomi also understood the difficulties Cleo faced returning to school after being hospitalized. “I felt like I had fallen off the earth,” she says of her experience. “And when I came back, I didn’t know what to do in society. I was scared.”

The climactic fight between Cleo and the devil also felt familiar: “In the book, the demon outside is saying things like, ‘Wouldn’t it be easier just to give up?’ But you hear that voice inside you that says that, and it feels like it makes it harder to fight.”

After writing together, “I had a better understanding of what she went through,” Ethan says. For Naomi, who just finished her second year of environmental studies at McGill University in Montreal, the book has become a gauge of her progress. “It’s a relief to see how much I’ve grown,” she says.

Naomi says she hopes her story inspires readers with a sense of possibility: “I want people to know that life may not be as smooth as they think it will be, but there is a way to live a happy and fulfilling life.”

If you or someone you know is in need of mental health support, text “STRENGTH” to Crisis Text Line at 741741 or visit crisistextline.org.