2012-11-25
Explanation
This comic presents what appears to be a simple questionnaire: "If you were at Arby'''s right now, how much would you spend?" with a blank line for the answer. Below it, the caption reads: "We managed to get the depression severity assessment down to a single question." The joke is that your willingness to spend money at Arby'''s -- a fast food chain often used as a punchline for low-quality dining -- could serve as a proxy for how depressed you are. The implication is that the more you'''re willing to spend at Arby'''s, the more depressed you must be, since only someone in a truly bleak emotional state would invest heavily in an Arby'''s meal.
Alternatively, the joke works in the other direction too: someone so depressed they cannot even muster the energy or desire to eat at all would spend nothing, while a moderately depressed person might find comfort in cheap fast food. Either way, the comic satirizes both the fast food chain and the overly reductive nature of clinical depression screening questionnaires, which sometimes try to boil complex mental health assessments down to simple metrics.
The votey panel shows a graph with "Sadness" on the Y-axis and "Arby'''s Spending" on the X-axis. The curve is U-shaped: at zero spending, sadness is high (labeled "Too Poor for Arby'''s"), it dips in the middle for moderate spending, then rises again at the extreme right end, labeled "Arbyphrenia" -- a made-up clinical term suggesting that excessive Arby'''s spending is itself a form of mental illness. This adds a layer of pseudo-scientific rigor to the joke, suggesting there is an optimal amount of Arby'''s consumption for mental health, and deviations in either direction indicate problems.