Graphic Lives: Ava: A Graphic Novel for Young Adults Dealing with an Eating Disorder

Graphic Lives is a series of highly engaging graphic novels for young people who may need counselling and psychotherapy. Each book introduces the difficulties faced by a teenage character and follows them as they travel on their therapeutic journey with a skilled and creative therapist.

The key aims of these books are:

• to demystify counselling and psychotherapy so that it is more appealing and accessible to young people
• to destigmatise emotional and mental health problems so that young people are better able to accept help
• to encourage young people to embark upon their own healing journeys, equipped with the sense that there is a way forward.

Sixteen year-olds Ava and Jade are obsessed with food, calories, and staying thin. Pleased with the many compliments they receive they push themselves into anorexia. Ava's mother is alarmed by her daughter's weight loss and forces her into therapy with the school counsellor, Steph. However after only two sessions Steph touches a raw nerve, Ava storms out and refuses to continue. Only when Jade is admitted to hospital does Ava return to therapy, where she begins to understand the causes of her anorexic tendencies.