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Originally Posted by Triple_R
I'm going to defend the handling of Menma the Ghost a bit.
For one, she does have the mind of a young, highly emotional, girl. So I can understand it taking her awhile to:
a) Realize she needs to put her emotions aside, and prove to everyone not named "Jinta" that she's really there.
b) Find a good way of proving just that.
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Point a) is really weird if you ask me, because Menma is portrayed as much more level headed than she appears to be. Even though I really can't see her more than a "sympathic, but not empathic" cute character, often being as annoying as Index, she was shown as being sort of sharp and able to drop playing the dumb ball when the context is being serious.
b) is rather difficult to consider it as valid if you ask me: Menma was interacting physically with everything around her range, and it wasn't really that difficult for her to try things (cakes, and so forth).
She wasn't shown having an epiphany or anything and yet, she naturally used the phone in this episode.
The question is: why not sooner? If physical contact was really a issue, how about asking Jinta playing the "psychic"? It doesn't take a workload of brainpower to ask one of the SPB members to pick a sheet, write anything they want and make Jinta "guess" what they wrote, from 10 meters afar.
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In Jinta's case, I think that he himself was not 100% sure she was really there until this episode. I think he may have been afraid that if Menma tried to prove her actual ghostly presence, but was unable to, that this may confirm to him that, well, he's insane. 
And many people with severe delusions/hallucinations don't want to accept that they're that far gone.
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The problem is that Jinta never tried to ascertain the situation. Sure, it was alright for him that he though he was having hallucinations first, but the evidences themselves were piling up, yet he basically lived as if it was "natural" for Menma to lurk around.
In fact, Jinta was incredibly passive for anything non Menma related which makes me sympathetic towards Naruko, considering how incompetent he is with his flesh friends.
As much as Jinta probably had his lion share of issues, it is... well, difficult to understand why it took so many times for him to stand his grounds. In fact, his character and logic were crumbling for weird reason: he is the character who knows Menma the best and he is still actually witnessing what she is wishing, with not so subtle hints and "fun".
Which leaves to the biggest interrogation: Why not doing anything, especially after Yukiatsu's incident?
Both characters are the very basis of the SPB group, yet they were doing the least of the group, until now. I daresay that Tsuroko was infinitely more useful regarding Naruko and Yukiatsu.
And that is something that doesn't bode too well when we have the previous leader trying to fulfill the wish of someone else, and that very person fooling around, for the lack of better words.
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Also, Poppo was an easy believer so you didn't need to convince him much it seemed. The rest were skeptical, but very polite about it (except Yukiatsu). So perhaps there was a sense that there wasn't a pressing need to convince people that Menma was really there.
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Honestly, I wonder if all the flashbacks and childhood talk wasn't for nothing during this "empty" period before this electoshock. In all seriousness, the gang became a group of teenagers trying to move on, but still completely stuck by the traumatic experience they got and the loss of a dear friend.
Even though things were crumbling, the obvious goal would be "everyone being friends again like before", yet neither Jinta or Menma were trying to spell out the issue in order to make everyone moving on.
You may say that it wasn't Jinta's goal to begin with, but since it is part of Menma wish, it has to be done. Meanwhile, Menma was portrayed as a very dedicated girls towards her friend, but for some reason, she just doesn't try to do anything about their problems and go happy go lucky until the boat is crashing into a very obvious iceberg, several times.
Well, I guess I'm being a bit nitpicky here, but that's all I wanted to bring out: I can't help but call that a plot hole, and the story itself doesn't really explain that, unless you want to ignore a huge chunk of characterization.