Content warning: This post deals with themes of suicide.
The noise over Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why has been so loud it’s drowned out almost everything else on the internet this week.
Rumoured to be the streaming platform’s most successful TV drama series to date, writers and mental health advocates have come out in droves to debate one hot topic:
Is this show opening up an important conversation parents and their teenagers needed to have for decades? Or is this a dangerous grab for money that’s simply guised as some concerned act of advocacy?
The web – and indeed Mamamia readers – seem utterly divided.
But between the countless memes, listicles, and opinion articles penned by columnists – I’ve searched for something I just couldn’t find.
Where are the voices of people who have lived this? Where are those who have had their lives penetrated by the dark tentacles of suicide? What do they think of 13 Reasons Why?
I decided to find out.
I spoke to 28-year-old Lee (she chose not to share her last name), whose little brother Mark died by suicide a few years ago. He was a twin and 24 years old when he passed away.
While there aren’t many parallels between Mark’s mental illness and the fictional storyline of Hannah Baker, Lee does worry about the messages 13 Reasons Why sends to high school students.
Her main issue with the show is a character I hadn’t even bothered to think about – Mr Porter, the school guidance counsellor.
Top Comments
This is another one persons perspective, though, and not one I agree with. I have dealt with a lot of what Hannah dealt with in this series (sexual assault, rape, isolation and emotional abuse). I would have found this particular narrative quite relateable and I think it would have helped in my personal circumstance. It actually not only brings back memories, but makes me more confident in my convictions now, as an adult. It has opened up specifically conversations amongst my friends about casual sexual assault and the pain of isolation, and I find myself sharing things I was actually embarassed to before, let alone at the time. Showing others what effect these things can have on a person has helped them understand what I have been through, and I can give them another dimension. I also found the suicide scene necessary, as I believe glossing over the actual precipice of her pain and the pain of death would have glorified it in a way... like it would have happened calm and quiet? Like it wouldn't have hurt? Like it wouldnt torture the people who found you? As though you just disappear and that's that. The visualisation of the painful, panic-inducing and messy death is more realistic than some romanticised glossing over.
I'm not sure if others feel the same, but this is my personal opinion, as someone who has not committed suicide, but seriously contemplated it. A friend of mine committed suicide two years ago, and I don't know if she would feel the same as the author above or myself, because despite knowing her I was not in her head, and I believe we can speak only to our personal thoughts. Had I not been alive today, would the people who knew me echo these thoughts? Who would know? At the very least, this show has brought these topics to the open more than I have ever seen, and that is definitely NOT a bad thing.
Actually the funny thing about this series and how it turns people and their complicated behaviour into a set of reasons, was that it made me realise that we should never hold ourselves accountable for other people's suicide. An estranged friend of mine killed herself 2 weeks after I walked past her at a train station. We hadn't spoken in 2 or3 years and didn't speakthatday. I never saw her again. After hearing of her death I always wondered what might have happened had I said something, could it have changed the situation.
Hannah's obvious assumption of her own faultlessness and how she contrasts that by assuming that everyone else's actions to her, even indirect actions are malicious and intentional really highlighted the irrationality of blaming 13 people for your suicide and indeed, the irrationality of the ultimate suicide. My friend was mentally ill, it wasn't my responsibility to save her and I had no way of knowing she needed it. Let it go.