Where Teen Dramas Fall Short

Graphic by Sabrina Kearney

By Kai Lockwood

During the past few months, I‘ve been quite privy to the television  habits of my little sister. As a nine-year-old, her TV diet, like those of many others her age, consists of the standard Disney or Nickelodeon high school dramas. As someone who remembers watching shows like Suite Life on Deck or Jessie as a kid, it is interesting to look back and see all of the things those programs got wrong about high school.  

Trust me, they got a lot wrong—teen shows paint a facade of a high school without swear words, homework, the college admissions process or acne. But most importantly, these shows rarely, if ever, touch on mental health. If a character is stressed about a paper or a big sports game, we can rest assured all stress will miraculously be tied up neatly in the 30 minute run time. So, being an inquisitive Exonian with time on my hands, I decided to look into depictions of teen mental health on television. 

As I conducted my investigation, again and again, I  found three words: Thirteen Reasons Why. While the TV show is now well-known and shunned for its appalling romanticization of teen suicide, it is in fact the perfect place to start. 

In many ways, Thirteen Reasons Why taught the TV industry how not to deal with major mental health problems. After an outcry from schools, mental health experts and parents, the show has been all but cast into the corner of “Oh, let’s never touch that again.” But while the show is unique in both the reaction it garnered and its definitive awfulness, Thirteen Reasons Why  is far from the only show that paints teen mental health only in terms of suicide. Whether it is the dead friend or sibling that unites the main cast to action, the death of a teen that shakes a town or some other trope, I was hard-pressed to find a TV show that presented teenage mental health as a main subject without mentioning or focusing on suicide. 

While suicide is a major facet of teenage mental health, with 11.8 in every 100,000 teens dying by suicide in 2017, I believe it’s equally important that our media deal with other mental health conditions and issues. There’s been some improvement in this regard—Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, for instance, asks the audience to empathize with a character who has borderline personality disorder. But again, these examples are few and far between in mainstream culture.

So why doesn’t the media focus on teenage mental health beyond suicide? It is partly, I think, because media about teenagers is seldom written with older teenagers in mind. The book version of Thirteen Reasons Why, for instance, was marketed to 6th-8th graders on the Scholastic Books website, and the majority of Disney Channel shows have teenage protagonists. So while we might want a more nuanced view of mental health, many studio executives have fallen into the trap of over-simplifying or even minimizing the complexities of mental health issues in order to reach younger audiences. 

And when shows don’t choose to emphasize suicide, many choose to dumb down mental health altogether. There is always that token episode where a nerdy character desperately wants to fit in or a traditionally pretty girl is insecure about her body. These tropes often blatantly stereotype, in part because stereotypes are easy to digest—the young men never get to have body issues and the seemingly popular kids never have doubts about fitting in. This messaging defines who gets to have mental health problems and gives kids the message that, if they don’t fit into the stereotype of the socially awkward, introverted, insecure and bullied kid, they won’t have to face mental health issues at all. And what of those characters who do grapple with problems of their own? Everything seems to get nicely tied up in thirty minutes. This presents the false narrative that these problems just go away with a little bit of time. 

The troubling thing, most of all, is the binary. On TV, it is either suicide or triviality, and that is so far removed from the truth. There are 265 distinct diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM5), and the fact that television does not think to include a teenager with post traumatic stress disorder or a teenager with dissociative personality disorder does a great disservice to all of us. 

 That binary tells younger children that their mental health illnesses are non-existent and abnormal, because we don’t get to see their stories in other teens. While I understand mental health is hard to tackle on TV, I am a firm believer that, even if someone doesn’t have a mental health problem of their own, seeing a good representation of mental health on TV will help build empathy for an overly-stereotyped and often feared population. Disney Channel gets it wrong—but it doesn’t need to.