13 Reasons why: Ethical challenges about suicide in a TV Series

Abstract

Can we really talk about “reasons” for a teen to commit suicide? Alejandro Ariel once said that “suicide is something that should not happen”, not in the sense of a moral condemnation but to question its character of inevitability. The approach of teen suicide through a television series provides a new twist, given that series are the contemporary relay of cinema for the general public. Daily, television series reach millions of viewers in the world, as novels or radio used to do before. The stories presented manage to convey the situational pathos and allow an unprecedented treatment of the problems. They can be used in a psychotherapeutic framework (as cinematherapy, for example) or as starting points for ethical-clinical analysis of on-screen fictions. The series 13 Reasons Why (Netflix, 2017) has been a success precisely because it shows us the «bullying» phenomenon in a radically different way, introducing the horizon of death, thus raising questions for bioethics and psychoanalysis. In this paper we investigate some crucial categories, such as institutional and subjective responsibility, sexual violence, acting out and passage to act. The lessons of the series are therefore extracted as a privileged cultural form that allows us to transmit, interrogate and analyze in a unique and moving way the singularities in situation.