I used to teach middle school and one day we had a mandatory assembly. Teachers and students were told it was an anti-bullying/suicide awareness assembly. It ended up being the author of 13 Reasons Why (this was several years ago, when it was just a book and they were in the planning stages of the tv production) doing a promotional tour. It was absolutely the lamest assembly I’ve ever attended in my life. He kept name-dropping that the tv show might feature Selena Gomez.
After the assembly I rented the book to see if it would work as a class novel but in the first couple chapters it had a blowjob scene and it was downhill from there, so yeah, not something I’d have my class of 12-13 year olds read together.
A couple years later the Netflix series came out and I watched it out of curiosity and because my kids were watching and talking about it. It was worse than the book because it romanticized suicide even more by actually showing the dead girl as a phantom character.
The author claims that he wrote it to help prevent teen suicide but IMO he made it worse by giving a false image of suicide and finality of death.
The concept of weaponizing your suicide against the people that you feel wronged you struck me as very dangerous for young audiences. I'm glad I did not watch this show when I was a depressed teenager. The show glorifies her suicide as an act of personal heroism. For people who do not feel important enough to live, I think it is a bad idea to suggest that their death can give them that importance. In some ways the show is bold for taking on several issues that most shows aimed at teenagers wouldn't want to sully their brand with, but in other respects it uses these issues somewhat irresponsibly and often seemingly for the sake of shock value.
A study set out to demonstrate that the teen suicide rate noticeably spiked in the month following the release of 13 Reasons Why and the data is certainly compelling. Highest spike in the five years prior to the show streaming. At least one girl that I read about watched the show and then killed herself shortly afterwards in the same way that Hannah does. I remember her mother saying she watched two episodes with the daughter and begged her not to finish the show due to her mental health problems. I believe Netflix removed the suicide scene from the show due to the pushback after release.
Mental health professionals urged Netflix to be careful how they approached it and were like “100% do not show her committing suicide”. Spoiler alert, Netflix does the exact opposite of what professionals recommended. I had a past suicide attempt and self harm issues, but had been stable for years before that show came out. That scene gave me, a “stable” adult, a complete panic attack. I can’t even imagine how I would’ve reacted seeing it when I was younger.
I'm not a mental health professional, but I've taken a number of classes on suicide prevention as well as media ethics surrounding reporting on or depicting suicide.
I've literally watched clips of it in training about the worst ways to depict suicide. It's so ridiculously bad. I've never watched the whole thing, but it's like a recipe for sending a kid vulnerable to suicide over the edge from what I have seen.
I'm sorry you had that experience, I can't imagine how upsetting it would be.
In the tub with a razorblade just straight up shows you her doing it and I believe it was correctly if memory serves.
I didn't feel the way others did about the show, but I've never been full blown suicidal. Have your run of the mill depression and a lot of the "I want to die / wish I was dead / etc" thoughts that come with. But haven't yet gotten to the point where I think of it as an option so I imagine it hits differently.
I watched that show the whole way through and pretty much had the polar opposite reaction to what you typically see people say on reddit who bash it.
Though after I want to say the 2nd season the 3rd kind of jumps the shark. The 2nd was stretching too iirc but not nearly as bad.
I don't know that this show would actually help people or anything, but I never felt like it romanticized these things either like people say.
It's very graphic, very detailed, and also still kind of filmed in an upsetting but weirdly beautiful way. People talk about "romanticizing" suicide a lot and I think it's difficult to get across in a Reddit post, but it's not necessarily making the idea of suicide look positive. It's these detailed, graphic depictions that still basically leave a "beautiful corpse" type of scenario.
It's an old concept, you find it in literature going back centuries, the idea of a "beautiful death." Copycat suicides are even sometimes referred to as "the Werther effect" because of a freaking Goethe novel in which the protagonist (Werther) kills himself and supposedly there was widespread copycat suicides from young men who related to his struggles. That probably wasn't real to the extent claimed, but copycat suicides are a thing and depictions of detailed suicide that people relate to can trigger it. So this isn't a new thing, but it's something we need to be more aware of.
I hope that makes sense, I can answer other questions if you want. It's been awhile since I saw it in a training so forgive any errors, but I distinctly remember getting uncomfortable because I did deal with depression and suicidal thoughts when I was younger and I know I would have identified with her and probably fantasized about it.
It shows her slitting her wrists in the bathtub. It’s been a few years and I don’t care to rewatch it, but I believe the shot shows basically the whole act.
I honestly wasn’t expecting to have such a reaction. I read the articles, I knew what it was about, so I knew I’d be affected in some way but didn’t think it would be that extreme. The second she did it I instantly started sobbing and shaking. Like no thoughts happened at all, it was just totally immediate. I don’t think any specific situation has “triggered” me like that before. And that’s 12+ years after my own attempt.
It deeply upset me. Deeply. I didn't even watch the show - my husband did. I happened to walk through during that scene and it fucked with my head. If I had seen that when I was a suicidally depressed 15 I can see that pushing me over the edge. It was a how to die beautiful tutorial.
I've never had any mental health issues. I'm not a squeamish person at all. I watch gory movies and shows all the time. And and I could still barely stomach the suicide scene.
I attempted suicide at 15. I was in the metal hospital for 6 weeks. I read/watched it at the age of 40. It definitely gave me urges, and thinking about it now years later still upsets me.
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u/Slightly_Default 27d ago edited 27d ago
There's a lot more than 13 reasons why that show is terrible.
Edit: thank you so much for the awards!