Amanda Rosenberg's That's Mental and Cheerfulness (E6)

That's Mental, by the comedy writer Amanda Rosenberg, is a dark-funny memoir of living with Bipolar II, depression, and anxiety, split into life before and after her diagnosis and told almost entirely through jokes. Asked to sum the book up, she keeps it light. In an interview with The Nerd Daily she describes it in five words: "Candidly mental but with jokes." That reflex to reach for humor and lightness, even in the dark, is, in the Big Five, one facet.

Reaching for humor in the dark is the Cheerfulness facet

That facet is Cheerfulness (E6), under Extraversion, how readily you feel and express joy, humor, and high spirits. A high scorer cracks jokes and finds the funny side even in hard times; a low scorer stays more sober and even. Rosenberg's whole voice is high E6 at work, using comedy not to deny her illness but to carry it, to make something bleak bearable and even shareable. It matters to be clear that the humor is the trait here, not the bipolar disorder, which is a serious clinical condition and not a personality facet, and this post is not a substitute for treatment.

What the book adds to the trait is a sense of what cheerfulness is for. Rosenberg is not pretending to be happy; she is using humor as a tool, a way to face the worst without being crushed by it and to let others in. That is high E6 doing real work, closer to courage than to denial. It also leans on a hardy Vulnerability (N6) at the resilient end, the capacity to take a blow and still find the joke, though the reflex itself, the reach for lightness, is Cheerfulness.

For a reader placing themselves, your E6 is a fair read on how much you reach for humor and high spirits, especially when things are hard. High on it and That's Mental will feel like kin, a book that jokes its way through the dark because that is how you cope too. Low on it and the book is a window into a temperament that meets pain with a punchline. Where you sit on Cheerfulness tells you how readily joy and humor rise in you, and we take the facet apart in Cheerfulness (E6).

Read the book: That's Mental: Painfully Funny Things That Drive Me Crazy About Being Mentally Ill by Amanda Rosenberg.

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