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.
The concept of weaponizing your suicide against the people that you feel wronged you struck me as very dangerous for young audiences.
Teenagers commonly have fantasies about getting back at those who wronged them. The idea that you could get revenge and escape whatever torment you're feeling at the same time is doubly empowering. I'd argue even that it doesn't take much of a jump to go from hurting others emotionally by killing yourself to bringing a gun to class to physically hurt them before killing yourself.
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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!