Shameless: A Dysfunctional Family

Shameless is about a dysfunctional family of a single father and six children on the south side of Chicago. The show is usually centered around the elderent child trying to raise the rest of her siblings and figure out life as their dad goes around town drinking and being a nuisance. Shameless has became one of my top shows to watch while growing up. There are a lot of strong characters that the world knows and love, but one that has always struck out to me has been Ian Gallagher. Ian is the middle child in the Gallagher family, a snappy ginger, and identifies with the LGBTQA+ community. Besides those fun facts about him, the one thing about him that brings him to be the topic of this paper is that he is diagnosed with Bipolar disorder, which his mother Monica suffers from.

The season ended with the audience seeing Ian enroll in the army under Lip’s (Ian’s older brother) identity. When we go into Season 4 of the series, we discover that he had abandoned training camp, stolen an army helicopter, and is now being chased by the army. This would be an example of a manic episode. One thing that supports this claim, would be his tattoo that he got of an eagle on a rifle. This symbolise the helicopter moment and entail that he thinks that this is a game and not understanding how serious this is (Shameless, Season 4, Episode 8). At this point, he starts working as a dancer at a gay bar while squatting in an abandoned house. Eventually, his siblings convince him to come back home so they can watch over him. As the days go by, he starts to have a major depression episode (Shameless, Season 4, Episode 12). Ian eventually gets out of this stage but, it takes a while for him to go back to “normal”. Even with him getting back to normal, he will always feel not satisfied, and bored with life, then the cycle repeats itself throughout the