ABSTRACT
The release of the Netflix TV series 13 Reasons Why was met with major criticisms from suicide and mental health experts for the series’ supposedly irresponsible representations of suicide. By thwarting media guidelines for suicide reporting, they argued, the show failed to minimise the risk of suicide contagion, to highlight the role of mental illness in suicide, and to promote the importance of suicide prevention. Indeed, the show presents suicide as the outcome of a rational decision-making process grounded in an evaluation of the social harms done to an individual. This chapter responds to these criticisms by positioning them in the context of public health approaches characterised by risk thinking. It is interested not only in how risk thinking informs experts’ readings of the TV show, but also in the subject positions these readings enable for those who end their lives. Mobilising technologies of the self and abjection as conceptual tools, the chapter shows that in a suicide prevention framework, the suicidal person is not only relegated to the position of an at-risk subject but is, paradoxically so, also positioned as a risky subject, with both subject positions, in a circular manner, setting in motion a de-agentifying machinery that seeks to sustain suicide prevention as the only possible response to suicide.
