A Corpus Based Study of 13 Reasons Why Netflix Series: Implications for School Mental Health Professionals

Unlike typical teen dramas streaming at the time, the 2017 season one premiere of 13 Reasons Why (13RW) activated discourse, controversy, and impact studies on a global scale. Most of the public debate centered around the portrayal of Hannah Baker’s suicide. The purpose of this study was to gain understanding of the significance of 13RW in terms of known verbal indicators of suicidality and to consider related implications for current school-based prevention practice. The Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software was used to analyze 13RW season one dialogue across 21 relevant word use categories. The selected variables spanned three variable types: broad psycholinguistic processes, linguistic processes, and psychological processes. The statistical analysis was the log-likelihood ratio test with risk ratio utilized to determine effect size. Results revealed significant differences between 13RW and modern television dialogue norms in nine of the postulated suicidality indicator variables. The most substantial differences were found in broad psycholinguistic and psychological process categories. By comparison, 13RW featured low analytic thinking and high authenticity measures with references to friend (friend, neighbor, guys) and present focus (today, is, now) word categories over one and a half times greater than the reference norm. This study highlights the value of incorporating popular culture artifacts and current psycholinguistic research toward understanding complex societal problems such as adolescent suicide. Implications for school-based suicide prevention include support for the incorporation of core language analysis concepts to strengthen evidence-based practices and efficiency.