A Tale of Two Trigger Warnings

Photo by Breana Panaguiton on Unsplash

During the Spring of 2017, I spent an entire weekend watching the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why. The macabre teen drama focuses on the story of Hannah Baker (played by Katherine Langford), a teenage girl who leaves a box of recordings detailing the “13 reasons” why she chose to commit suicide. Therefore, the story moves back and forth in time as the recipient of the tapes, Hannah’s classmate Clay Johnson (played by Dylan Minnette), attempts to make sense of the tragic loss of his friend.

And while I loved the series’s first season for handling several complex topics and its relatable storytelling around the trauma of teenage girlhood, that was not how everyone saw the show. The moment the series launched, multiple think pieces emerged, with everyone from film critics to school psychologists pointing out how the series was glamorizing suicide and promoting unhealthy psychological coping mechanisms. Many went as far as to argue that the show, and the book it’s based on, negatively influenced young viewers to take their own lives like the series’ protagonist. The book has also faced its own controversies, being banned at schools…