The View From Halfway Down: Mental Illness in Television
Mental health on television shows is a tricky subject to navigate. There are too many examples of mental health being romanticized or villainized in media. For example, in the show 13 Reasons Why, a show that was meant to “start a conversation” about mental health, did the opposite, portraying mental health in an alarmingly negative way. This show opted for romanticizing the subject, showing the lead protagonist, Hannah Baker, as a good person for exploiting 13 of her classmates and teachers on tapes that recorded exactly which part they each played in her suicide. This portrayal of suicide and depression makes it seem like suicide is the right thing to do when all your friends are mean to you and you don’t want to confront your issues. Sure, we have to watch the grueling aftermath of Hannah’s suicide, but her petty tapes keep any lesson from being learned at all. Although this is a common theme among pop culture portrayals of suicide and mental health, there are certain shows that manage to walk the line of mental health perfectly.
While being locked away in my house for the past couple of weeks, I’ve spent a large portion of my time catching up on TV shows. I recently finished the final season of Bojack Horseman, an animated series about a horse who is washed up from his 90s sitcom, Horsing Around, and finds himself struggling to cope with his life and career.
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| (1) Bojack Horseman |
This show has the best portrayal of mental illness on TV. Instead of blaming all of Bojack’s mistakes on his mental illness, and addictions, the show holds him accountable, along with all of the other characters. When Bojack almost dies and leaves a voicemail to his friend Diane, telling her that if she picked up the phone he wouldn’t die, the show doesn’t make this a “touching” moment between the characters. It manages to mirror reality in an eerily familiar way, and when they meet again after that, Diane is rightly, mad at Bojack, telling him that it wasn’t fair to say something like that to her, especially since there was nothing she could’ve done to help him even if she did pick up.
If anyone has ever had a close friend or a loved one who struggles with mental health do this to them, you know the feeling, the utter terror that maybe they will do something they might regret, and you're not doing anything to stop it. I have had this happen to me before and I remember after realizing she was okay, I was extremely angry with her for worrying me and my other friend like that since we had spent the past 2 hours calling and calling and crying thinking that our friend was going to die. It isn't some "heroic" act to put blame on other people for your actions, like 13 Reason's Why makes it out to be.
Bojack constantly has to deal with the pain he caused to others, even if it is when he is on a drunken bender, something that we never see on television, but it is our reality. Mental illness isn’t an excuse to be a bad person, it may cause you to do bad things to the people around you, but that doesn’t make their hurt invalid.
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This is the right message to send to an audience. That the actions you do may cause harm to other people even if you don’t realize it, and sometimes you have to suck it up and just apologize for it. Drowning in your own sorrows and forcing everyone to pay attention to you, much like Bojack does in earlier seasons, or Hannah Baker does for the entire plot of the show, never solves the issue at hand.
When Bojack is afraid of facing his TV producers because he feels guilty that he was the reason why the director was fired in Season 2, he runs away to New Mexico. After leaving for so long, he only ends up back in LA with the same problems he had when he left. Much like Hannah Baker, none of her issues were solved from her suicide, besides making everyone around her feel guilty for her death. The difference in the two is that Bojack recognizes this and holds him accountable, showing that running away from your issues isn’t how you solve them, while 13 Reasons Why has an entire plot that revolves around her suicide as a perfectly justifiable way to go about fixing your issues.
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| (3) Diane and Bojack |
Bojack stands out from other shows that deal with mental illness simply because of how well the characters are thought out. Each with their own lives, issues, motivations, backstories, and wants, each of them feels real and human. Through the lens of animation, Bojack is able to show emotions through a visual media in a way I haven’t seen before. For example, in the 10th episode of season 6, "Good Damage", Diane is trying to write her memoir, but she struggles to even start the book. Since the beginning of the season, Diane is in a healthy relationship and is starting to deal with her depression in a healthy way, after realizing that she was the only one standing in the way of becoming the person she longs to be. But as the pressure from the memoir begins to weigh on her, she finds herself spiraling, unable to write the memoir. Every day is a constant struggle to stay focused, to stay sane, and eventually, days turn to nights in an instant, with no progress on the page. I think a lot of writers can attest to this, I know I have been in this place so many times. The show has a lot of liberty with the animation, and they are able to show her train of thought as she is trying to write and is constantly coming up empty. It was crazy for me to watch this moment on screen, because I know that feeling.
Although Diane had “fixed” her depression, she still couldn’t write her story, even though the depression is what she originally thought was getting in the way of her writing. This is another example of how well Bojack manages to show mental illness in the show. It never uses it as a crutch to explain away the issues of a character, instead, it shows the reality of these things; just because Diane dealt with depression, doesn’t mean she is ready to write an entire memoir about her past. Often times, writing can feel like that, especially if you had just resurfaced from a bad period of depression, the last thing you would want to do is sit and relay everything that made you depressed in the first place. And it’s okay to not be ready.
One last episode I’d like to point out is season 6 second to last episode “The View From Halfway Down”. This episode directly deals with suicide as it follows Bojack’s half-dead consciousness into limbo as he confronts all of the people close to him who have died in the past; people who's death he feels partially responsible for, or people who he wasn't able to make amends with before they died. Each of the characters do a performance in a variety show like setting, and then die in the same way they died in real life, as Bojack is forced to relive each of their deaths.
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| (4) Secretariat View From Halfway Down |
The reason I bring this very grim episode up is because one of the characters had committed suicide, Secretariat, Bojack’s childhood hero. Instead of pretending like suicide is some be all and end all to your problems, Bojack Horseman managed to do what 13 Reasons Why couldn’t.
As Hannah Baker died, she left behind tapes for everyone to feel responsible for her death, and when Secretariat meets Bojack in his limbo state, he tells him about the view from halfway down, that when you are falling, you see the view from halfway and you want to turn back, you want to be alive. Although 13 Reasons Why claims that by making Hannah’s death scene so graphic was a way to make people not want to commit suicide, it does the opposite, essentially showing people how to commit suicide. Bojack shows a more positive aspect of it, that even if you are determined to die like Secretariat was, you are still utterly terrified when you see the view from halfway down. It shows the audience that suicide isn’t an answer, it’s scary and permanent and often times those who are falling off of that bridge, hope to wake up alive. It’s a much more positive perspective than 13 Reasons Why, as it essentially shows that is is always better to live and try, rather than to give up.
Bojack has to deal with his own emotions head-on, instead of running from his past issues like he constantly tries to do, he has to come to terms with them. He can’t pretend like they didn’t happen and he can’t use them as an excuse to burden everyone around him, he is the only one who can fix himself. Even though it is a very long and hard journey for Bojack, the season ends with him being alive, and although he hasn’t fixed all of his mistakes he is hopeful and ready to try.
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This is reality, you can’t rewrite the past, and you can’t pretend like everything will be wrapped up nice and neat with a bow at the end of each episode of your life. Every day you still have to live with yourself, and the only way to make that manageable is to find a way to love yourself, which is something I have learned from an animated show about a horse who lives in a fictional version of Hollywood. Bojack Horseman is the greatest representation of mental illness on television ever, and each time I sit down to watch it I learn something new about not only the characters but myself.
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