13 Reasons Why Review
13 Reasons Why is a Netflix series that deals with some of the hardest hitting issues it could. It is the first time I have seen warnings appear before episodes to give viewers an indication that they might want to skip parts of this episode.
The story centres on Clay, a high school student who receives a delivery of a box of cassette tapes. These turn out to be the final messages from Hannah, a girl who ended her own life a few weeks before the start of the series. These tapes are the “13 reasons” why she committed suicide, each one focussing on a single person who in some way caused her to end up in that dark place.
Part of the effect the series has on the viewer relies on the exploration of the story alongside Clay. Because of that, I can’t describe any more of the plot than the premise without ruining it for you.
However, it is a very powerful effect. I am someone who has experience with mental health problems and so it perhaps impacted me more than it would some viewers. In a similar way to how Clay takes several days to get through the tapes, it took me a few days to get through the episodes because I needed time to recover between them.
Because that is something that this show does. It makes you care about Hannah despite the foregone conclusion of how her story ends. And just because it is fictional does not mean your own mental health will not be affected. In particular, her suicide is show in full, graphic and horrific detail in the final episode, as her story reaches its end. I couldn’t watch that scene. It had none of the false “romance” or pretend “beauty” commonly found in depictions of suicide. It is brutal and painful and ugly and there is nothing good about the act.
I can’t speak for how accurately the high school resembles a real US high school. I hope it isn’t that close to reality. In any case, the pupils are shown to be mostly realistic characters albeit ones whose motivations don’t always add up. I suspect this is a result of padding a thirteen-chapter book into almost thirteen hours of television, but it is very difficult to make sense of the thoughts of some of the subjects of the tapes without making them all seem unbelievably selfish and without any morals.
I also spent a large part of the series struggling to understand Hannah’s viewpoint and how exactly it led her to take her own life. It takes almost the entire series for her pain to be properly explained. But by then, the impression of Hannah as an unreliable narrator had already sunk in. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though, it is important to realise that no one person can correctly remember or describe everything. Hannah isn’t telling the truth; she’s telling her truth.
That’s perhaps one of the subtler messages hidden away behind all the questions about to what extent Hannah is telling the truth: to her, all of it was true. People will interpret the world in different ways and, especially when you suffer from a mental health problem, events may seem far more negative to you than to others.
At the end of the day, it is a drama and one that requires some suspension of disbelief to be truly effective. It begins with the aftermath of a suicide, looks at the fallout and build-up to that suicide and finishes with what is, at best, a bittersweet ending. There are better depictions of mental health out there. There are definitely more optimistic looks at it.
But in my opinion, the lesson of the entire series is summed up by an exchange near the end of the final episode:
“Are you ok?”
“No. Is that alright?”
“Yeah, that’s fine.”
And if conversations like that become more common, well then I think we’d all be better off for it.
Samaritans is a confidential listening service available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. They can be contacted on 116 123 or at jo@samaritans.org
Contact details for equivalent organisations in other countries can be found at 13reasonswhy.info
- Matthew Axby
