From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!menlo70!sytek!zehntel!tektronix!tekmdp!bronze!kenr Newsgroups: net.suicide Title: self-portraits Article-I.D.: bronze.489 Posted: Thu Mar 3 09:16:27 1983 Received: Fri Mar 11 06:17:23 1983 I had an interesting telephone discussion last night with a friend of mine who administers psychological tests. One particularly interesting test is to ask the subject to draw a picture of himself. In the interest of brevity I won't describe *everything* psychologists look for in a subject's self-portrait, but one important clue that may reveal suicidal tendencies is the resemblance of the drawing to a popular cartoon character. For example, many potentially suicidal subjects tend to draw themselves as one of the characters from "Peanuts", often Snoopy. Those of us who draw self-portraits that resemble bathtubs full of brightly-colored machine parts are diagnosed differently, as you might expect. Your pal, Ken Rhodes P.S. Van Gogh doesn't count.