I recently gave up my job to take a sabbatical from a hectic corporate work life and to get myself prepped for graduate school, where I’ll be pursuing a Masters in Social Work. This past week, I was intrigued by the hype surrounding the Netflix original Thirteen Reasons Why and I decided to binge watch it. I’ve read a lot of mixed reviews around the show— some people think its great, some are vehemently criticizing the show for being irresponsible with its depictions of assault and suicide.

I am actively choosing to make a career by being a mental health practitioner but I’ve always considered myself an artist too— I write plays, I perform stand-up comedy and I have a BA in Theater. Considering all that, I tried watching ‘Thirteen Reasons Why’ as both an artist and as a potential mental health practitioner.

Let me say this— the show is probably one of the toughest things I have watched recently. The last thing I recall being as tough was creating my senior thesis, a play I wrote about rape, in which I used stand-up comedy extensively to bring to attention what rape does to the affected body. Keeping aside academic discussions, I recall my biggest struggle being reconciling how dark my work was and how I would keep my audience informed about the fact that it could perhaps be triggering and extremely uncomfortable. Yet, I keep shuffling back and forth between whether I’m okay with how assault and suicide were handled on Thirteen Reasons Why.

As a potential mental health practitioner, the show is trigger after trigger after trigger in several ways and many times even before the disclaimer about depictions of violence and assault comes up in some of the episodes. It puts on display the dark thoughts of a troubled Hannah Baker, the teenage girl who commits suicide, and around whom the series is premised. She leaves thirteen tapes that elucidate in great detail the events and individuals that led to her decision. Her language, both spoken and that of her body, are incredible pointers to her troubled feelings— things that mental health practitioners are trained to latch on to, things that even normal people would understand to know something is wrong. The show makes no qualms about displaying how brutally cruel high school can be and that too can be potentially damaging to a young audience. The show displays the effect of how Hannah’s picture, taken out of context and distributed to her high school, tarnishes her image and begins a barrage of terrible events. I identified with that considering my high school experiences of being called a ‘touch-me-not plant’ among several other names that greatly hindered my ability to make friends. Moving forward, the episodes implicate several peers in Hannah’s life as the reasons behind her suicide, in graphic detail— so much so that it moved me to inconsolable tears and also didn’t allow me to watch how incredibly painful it was. From the standpoint of being someone who will come face-to-face with such situations as a profession, the show did disturb me to great lengths. It forced me to think about how to truly deal with the gravity of assault and suicide in individuals who are so young, impressionable and only just beginning to form their opinions of the world around them. It made me wonder about whether I’ve missed the signs in someone I know. It makes me think of what really is the right way to help someone break open and be honest about the pain they’re feeling and facing, beyond the courtesy of asking ‘How are you?’

Yet, as an artist and storyteller, as someone who writes to give words to experiences that are incredibly difficult to talk about, the show’s raw and almost real depictions of assault and suicide made me think they were necessary. Several people have talked about how the assault scenes and the suicide scene were horrible and how they also seemed like how-to-do scenes. Watching those scenes reminded me of the staging of Mies Julie, a South African adaptation of the same title written by August Strindberg, that I saw in London in 2012. The play is an intense and charged depiction of the illicit relationship between a Black South African man and a White South African woman in light of the recent end of apartheid. In the end, the woman, realizing that she is pregnant with the man’s child, takes a sickle that she plunges into her genitals to end her life an the potential of bearing the man’s child. I recall how there was hardly any conversation around how difficult that last scene was and how the show was lauded for how rightfully important it was. Yet, with Thirteen Reasons Why, circling around underage lives, these scenes became troubling when the reality of the lives around us isn’t different from what’s put on display.

The brutality of assault and the intensity of suicide is what the people we know and love grapple with or have grappled with at some point. I know several women in my life and in all honesty, I can only recall one that hasn’t had any experience of being assaulted in any which way. Statistics usually say 1 in 4 women are likely to face assault in their lives but statistics can be manipulated and they don’t give you the real picture. Assault and suicide— they reveal themselves in silence, in the quiet, where nobody can hear them. As an artist, I’m so grateful that a piece of work could make me feel so strongly and pierce right through to the core of my darkest, most painful emotions. In some ways, Thirteen Reasons Why held up a mirror to the world about how tough it is to be a teenager and how a little bit of attention and care can bring out the most beautiful and pure things out of a person. It had its flaws in its storyline, among other things and those are all for another article. But, it drew out the stinging and long lasting pain of what assault and suicide do to individuals and communities. It calls for attention to be paid; it calls for people to consider the consequences of their actions. More than anything, it begs you to understand that people are a plethora of emotions and experiences that need an outlet, a voice, a space where they can be shared, felt and understood.

I’m still grappling with how I feel about Thirteen Reasons Why and its success lies in that. It makes you think, it makes you mad, it makes you open your eyes to the reality of what happens around us everyday. It reminds you of the many times you could have extended help or how you could have been there for each other. I suppose one thing they could have done is put emphasis on warnings its viewers considering how tough the subject matter is to handle. Yet, the fact that its begun a conversation around something so difficult is the first stepping stone to acknowledging how we can go about dealing with depictions of assault and suicide on screen and also dealing with their reality everyday.