Welcome to Irabu's Office is extremely surreal 11 episode psychological comedy about a psychiatrist called Ichirou Irabu and the patients that ask for his help. Each episode focuses on a different patient with a different (often ridiculous) psychological condition that interferes with their lives. The patients show extremely abnormal behavior that end up being manifestations or coping mechanisms for their individual struggles.
For example, episode 6 is about a teenage cell phone addict that can't go without texting for any amount of time. He can't even put it down for family dinner and when his phone breaks he has a panic attack and immediately makes his mom buy him a new one. From the outside looking in it's easy to view him in a pretty 1 dimensional and negative way, but what this belies has more to do with loneliness and separation anxiety more than anything else.

The people he texts? They're really the only contact he has and even then they don't talk face to face, they're just text buddies. Texting is easy, instant and lets you articulate yourself more carefully than IRL interaction which comes less naturally to people like him. When he texts his friends, it makes him feel connected, secure, and accepted. When he doesn't, those feelings go away and he's forced to deal with loneliness and the thoughts that come with it, which he can't handle and makes him panic. Lots of people have experienced things like this i'd imagine. Even if you don't even own a cell phone, his feelings of isolation and anxiety can resonate with you and even if you don't relate to any of it at all, it makes you understand those who would.

This is all while the show is lambasting crazy trippy as hell visuals, changing art styles and even including real peoples faces overlaid onto the characters half the time. I'd hesitate to call the show's visuals "good" going by normal peoples sensibilities but it's at least one hell of a thing to look at and as someone that likes bright colors, surreal visuals and tacky aesthetics I was very much into it. The show also has an extremely memorable and varied OST which I still listen to months and months after initially watching it.

There's a lot I love about this show, but what might've bumped it up to a 10 for me is the message it sends. Irabu himself is a very unconventional character and you could consider him a very unprofessional psychiatrist. He injects his patients with placebo shots, recommends them to do weird sometimes illegal things to treat their conditions, and generally acts in a very aloof, uncaring manner around his patients. Many cases are treated in strange ways such as when he tells his patient with OCD that obsesses over leaving hot objects like kettles in his house in fear that it'll burn down his apartment and everyone else's in the complex, even if he makes 100% sure to leave it off. Irabu's solution (for one of his anxieties, being cigarettes burning his apartment down) is to just put a bucket of water in his room where he can throw his cigarettes.

You might think it'd help but ultimately his problems would just persist, but that's kind of the point. There isn't a pill for everything, no easy fixes, some problems just persist after any amount of introspection or psychoanalysis and that's okay. All problems have an underlying reason, but some of these reasons just stick with us for life. as the final scene of the show states, nobody's perfect. it's fine to struggle, it doesn't make you broken. If we could just see a therapist and fix all our issues shows like these shows wouldn't even exist. What we can do is try to understand our own issues and work towards minimizing them with the tools we have at our disposal, as well as trying to empathize with others, considering not just their actions but the reasons behind them as well. Thank you very much for reading this.