13 Reasons Why: 9 Reasons It Ultimately Fails

2. It Doesn't Analyse Its Subject Matter Deeply Enough

For a series that centres itself around a suicide, there's really not a lot of examination into what moves a person to take their own life. Throughout the course of the series we see suicide, self-harm, sexual abuse, slut-shaming, and bullying, all of which factor into the wider narrative and some of which form the reasons for Hannah's death.

As I've said before, the show should be admired for taking those on and certainly helping to open up an important and necessary dialogue around topics like suicide and rape, but that doesn't mean it succeeds in dealing with them.

What we see are a series of events, and these events are why Hannah killed herself. It's 'X person did this, Y person did that, so Z person commits suicide'. But while something like bullying can be a contributing factor in someone choosing to end their own life, there's more typically a myriad of reasons, many of which we'll never truly know, and the show doesn't explore them. On the matter of self-harm, for instance, we hear Skye say that it's "what you do to not commit suicide." Again, this kind of messaging - suicide is bad, but self-harm is ok I guess as long as you're not going any further? - just feels really off.

The most glaring omission is the complete lack of conversation around mental health. Of course you don't need to be someone has mental health issues to commit suicide, but there are studies that show it is a major factor, with one report finding 90& of people who commit suicide have a diagnosable mental illness. The fact that we don't hear terms such as 'mental health' or 'depression' come up even once is startling, and a failure by the writers to address the real underlying causes of suicide.