STATE OF MIND

Suzan Green thinks there’s something funny about divorce. Layoffs can be amusing; foreclosures, downright hysterical. Green calls herself a cartoon therapist, and she advises her analysands to take the laughing cure--an 8-by-10-inch sketch of their woes.

For years, whenever a friend seemed down in the dumps over a troubled romance, Green, 43, a theme-park design consultant and free-lance illustrator, would draw her a cartoon. The wickedly funny result--men cowering in roasting pans, men shaped like unicycles aimlessly digging ruts, men with brains hooked up to ATM machines--gave her a reputation. Her friends told their friends and soon she was in business, listening to people talk about their lovers, bosses, parents and capturing the problem in a sketch, for $50 to $100.

“Trying to think your way out of problems seldom works,” says Green, who has no formal art or psychoanalytic training. “People love to sum up a situation with one good, hard-hitting visual. It helps to focus their emotions.”

Since 1987, Green’s North Hollywood business, Cartoon Therapy, fueled exclusively by word-of-mouth requests, has prescribed about 100 cartoons a year. Green remembers one client who endured months of flirting from a man who hadn’t the guts to ask her out for a date. When she finally asked him out, “he kind of curled up and played dead,” says Green. Her cartoon--”What men do when women actually ask them out”--featured a dead insect, legs curled in the air.

“It made her feel so much better,” says Green. “Men can be such insects. Now she laughs at that would-be boyfriend whenever she looks at the cartoon on her refrigerator. I think it empowers her.”

Eccentric bosses are often the subject of cartoons. Other lampoons are ordered for special events, like the retirement of the director of royalties at MCA Records. The result, “The Wizard of Royalties,” was a man dressed in a robe emblazoned with dollar signs. His thoughts: “One for you and $10,875.76 for us . . . and one for you and . . . .