Bob is the father of all the children I have talked about in previous blog posts. In most episodes, he is typically laid back and not having any major signs of any mental illness, but whenever Bob gets hurt and gets prescribed medicine, we can see his struggles with substance abuse. There are multiple episodes where he gets an injury and is prescribed hard pain medication– most likely opioids– and he gets out of control.

In season 2, episode 4 Bob is playing an old school video game trying to beat his rival’s score. He ends up getting carpal tunnel because of how much he was playing the game, so his doctor gave him a brace and a prescription. Bob immediately starts taking too many pills, he would say something about how he only needs 1 but would take 3 instead and just shrug it off, like it was nothing. In this specific episode, he took too many pills and haven’t slept in at least 24 hours before he went to the arcade to play his game. He then meets a kid who is being rude to Darryl (a kid who was helping Bob with the game) and starts hallucinating that he is in the video game, Burgerboss. Bob starts to chase this child out of the arcade and down the street, while yelling at him and throwing various objects; including a metal trash can lid. Keep in mind, this is a CHILD and Bob is a grown man chasing him down the street because he is hallucinating, proving just how severe his substance abuse is when he can get his hands on it.

Later in that same episode, his wife Linda gets a call on the restaurant phone from the yacht club downtown. They tell her that she needs to come down there immediately, but not why. She gets there and sees Bob with a crazed look in his eye, waving around the end of an oar trying to fend people off that were trying to calm him down. After they finally get Bob out of there, Linda takes his pills and tells him he can’t have anymore, which further proves that Bob has a problem whenever he has access to them.

I have not said Bob is addicted to anything because this is not seen in a crazy number of episodes. This is only seen when Bob gets injured and has a way to get these drugs, he doesn’t actively seek them out like an addict would. The show seems to put more emphasis on the other characters mental illness and try to portray Bob as the “normal” one, so they often just overlook his substance problem. There is never any talk about his issue outside of the episode that it is involved in, but Tina’s anxiety is brought up in episodes where she isn’t having a panic attack, which implies that they don’t want to focus on it, so Bob can keep his “normal” image.