Broken, On Purpose — Depression in Pop Culture

Depression is no longer hidden. What was once whispered about in waiting rooms or buried beneath polished smiles has moved, loudly, into the center of our culture. Mental health is now at the heart of many of the most celebrated stories of our time, and the conversation it has opened is one we are nowhere near finished having. 

Depression is more than just feeling the blues on a gloomy rainy day; it's a clinical mental health issue that, according to the WHO, affects more than 332 million people worldwide. It removes the brain’s ability to feel pleasure, to rest, to want things, to live. It is a thief that steals slowly, leaving behind the structure of a life while emptying it of meaning. 

Although feeling “sad” is a symptom of depression, it is just more than just temporary emotional distress. Persistent fatigue, a loss of interest in activities that were once fulfilling, changes in sleep patterns, and difficulty concentrating are just a few symptoms that may indicate depression. However, depression can often develop gradually and may be hard to detect, making it hard for both individuals and their peers to recognize the gravity of the issue. It does not discriminate by age, background, or success. It can live inside a person who seems just fine. 

Awareness matters because silence kills. In recent years, serious concerns about mental illness have been on the rise. With one in seven adolescents experiencing some type of mental disorder globally and suicide rates increasing by over 154%, it is clear that awareness and accurate representation is more important than ever. 

In a time where mental health representation is becoming more common in the media and being portrayed in different ways, we must build towards a future where society understands depression accurately and eliminate the stigma caused by misconceptions and stereotypes to allow for open conversations that influence empathy and understanding. 

Is pop culture finally getting it right? The honest answer is: kind of. More than before, but still not enough. We are at a crosspoint: a shift from the long era of hiding mental illness to the current movement of, perhaps overwhelmingly, radical openness. Older generations learned to “perform” just fine—you endured, not exhibited. Therapy was for people who couldn’t. Emotional difficulty was something to be managed quietly, not displayed. Vulnerability was weakness. Now the pendulum has swung. We live in an age of oversharing, of vulnerability as currency, of even being too—too public, too honest, too much. Whether you think this new openness represents genuine progress in our society or a new kind of performativity, something has shifted. The pivot point, as we could argue, was COVID-19—although, of course, mental health being taken seriously started much earlier in the 18th century. Nevertheless, the pandemic stripped away every distraction and forced people to sit alone, isolated with their own minds. Suddenly, vulnerability was not a weakness or a disease—it was the only honest response to our complicated, incomprehensible world. So then, pop culture, already shifting, accelerated. The “perfect” character—the protagonist who suffers shortly and recovers neatly—was rejected in favour of something new, something messier, more honest, and far more difficult to watch. 

Cast your perspective back a few decades. When depression appeared in mainstream television and film, it came with a particular costume. It was the eccentric genius undone by his own brilliance, a mysterious young girl lost in quiet sadness, a gifted child who grew up too fast, or a meticulous musician collapsing under the pressure. Maybe it was the tragic woman at the window. Or the villain whose cruelty was explained, and then excused, by some childhood wound. Depression was madness, incompetence, or unpredictability, a dramatic emotional device rather than a lived experience, and it carried the implicit yet unmistakable whiff of shame. The illness was just for the plot; it created tension and crisis and spectacle. Then it was resolved, or it ended in tragedy, and either way the story moved on. There was no living with it. In many cases, these portrayals simplified and stereotyped depression, and often became a tool that storytellers used to explain violence without exploring the characters inner struggles. This misleading narrative perpetuates the idea that mental health issues were abnormal rather than an issue that millions of people faced. 

The present looks different. Modern audiences, particularly younger viewers, are drawn to imperfect, emotionally complex characters, which encourages modern narratives to present stories that involve depression to be a long term experience that influences one's thoughts, emotions, and relationships. They are drawn to the people who carry their hurt, their numbness across seasons, who have good days and terrible months, who are sometimes funny and sometimes unbearable, and who are always trying. The portrayal has become nuanced, willing to sit in the discomfort without resolving or “fixing” it. This shift in media is not merely an aesthetic one, but a moral one. 

Case studies

BoJack Horseman

BoJack Horseman remains perhaps the most sophisticated depiction of depression in animated history. This show understood something that most narratives don’t: depression is not a feeling. It is the absence of feeling. It is a numbness that perhaps makes the person suffering from it appear simply selfish. BoJack is not sympathetic; he is destructive, narcissistic, and often cruel. He sabotages every relationship he has ever valued, sometimes deliberately. And yet the show never stops insisting that this is what untreated depression looks like. BoJack isn’t a sad person asking for help, not at all. He is a person who has learned to survive by making everything about himself because the alternative is the pool, the darkness, the bottom. The show refused to redeem him cheaply. BoJack gets better and then he gets worse. He has breakthroughs and then disappears. Healing is not an easy process nor is it a destination. It is a daily practice, and sometimes people don’t make it. 

13 Reasons Why

13 Reasons Why deserves to be examined carefully, rather than condemned. The show arrived in 2017 with something valuable to say: that teenage suffering is real and that schools and adults frequently fail young people in crisis. The show’s source material, Jay Asher’s novel of the same name, had connected with millions of people who recognised themselves in Hannah Baker. But the adaptation made some questionable and catastrophic choices. It depicted Hananah’s death in graphic detail, a scene so explicit that Netflix eventually removed it due to criticism and pressure from mental health experts. It structured the narrative as some kind of revenge or justice, in which Hannah’s suicide becomes the mechanism through which the people who wronged her are forced to confront what they did. This presents suicide as effective, as a form of communication, as something that wil make the people who failed you finally understand, which is incredibly dangerous. 

Outside the curated world of television and film, something stranger has happened. Mental illness has become content. 

Influences across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have turned their struggles into their brand, and the line between destigmatisation and commercialization has become very difficult to locate. When a creator with ring lighting and a million followers documents their depression, are they breaking stigma, or merely building an aesthetic?

This tension is most evident in the rise of the “sad girl” aesthetic: a girl alone by a rain-streaked window, oversized sweaters, a copy of some Sylvia Plath book face-down on unmade sheets with Lana Del Rey playing in the background. There is a particular kind of image that has come to define a generation’s relationship with sadness, and this is pretty much it. Softly lit, quiet, aesthetic, and aching. The term itself is slippery, as “sad girl” is not a diagnosis or a movement in any sense. It is more an emotional term, a way of living that prizes introspection over resolution, and romanticizes sadness as beauty. The sad girl aesthetic has roots in the early 2010s on Tumblr, where melancholy was something to be curated rather than concealed. It found its voice through music, like Lana Del Rey’s slow, orchestral music, drowning in nostalgia for a past that never really existed. Americana tragedy, vintage fashion, glamour, and open wounds—what more could you want? To dismiss the sad girl aesthetic as moodiness is to miss its radicalism. For centuries, emotional women were “hysterical,” unreliable, unwell. The culture taught girls to manage their feelings and to present cheerfulness as the acceptable face of femininity. The sad girl aesthetic refuses this, and insists that feeling deeply is not a failure. There is something significant about women representing their own inner lives that are worthy of beauty. This is also why the aesthetic has generated its critics. Many argue it romanticizes depression, packaging genuine suffering as something complacent, picturesque, and bearable. The concern is real, because when sadness becomes an identity, it risks flattening the lived experiences of mental illness into something soft and stylish. It can stop being something a person has and something a person is, and so the line between authentic emotional expression and the aesthetic consumption of female suffering and pain is not always cleanly drawn. 

Sadness has always been the muse of art, and the sad girl aesthetic is a living, contested conversation—one that touches heavily on mental health, consumerism, and feminism. 

The algorithm does not care about safe messaging guidelines; it cares about engagement. And vulnerability drives follower counts. So for a young person already struggling to stumble upon a community that makes depression look like the pinnacle of romanticization can be genuinely dangerous. 

There is a question about whether the pendulum has swung too far. The oversharing era has its casualties. Sensitivity, when it becomes compulsive, when it is performed for an audience, can become its own cage. There is a difference between speaking honestly about depression and building an identity around it. 

Pop culture’s normalization of depression is imperfect, occasionally exploitative, contradictory, yet still extraordinary. The power of being seen cannot be overstated. We are living in a moment where anyone of all ages can turn on a screen and see themselves. They can hear a character describe the exhaustion of pretending to be fine and see, maybe for the first time, that they are not crazy. Someone, somewhere, understood. The stories we tell each other shape the stories we can tell about ourselves. For too long, the story of depression was one of shame, and pop culture is willing to write a different ending.