How Netflix's “Wednesday”Explores Adolescent Stress And Therapy
The Addams Family spinoff has joined a recent spate of works sensitively exploring teenage mental health
Wednesday Friday Addams is an iconic cartoon character from the bizarre and macabre Addams Family.
American director Tim Burton’s recent cinematic venture uses this beloved character to comment on mental health issues teenagers and young adults face.
Her name drawn from the nursery rhyme line, “Wednesday's child is full of woe”, Wednesday is known to display a self-assured and flamboyant gothic, narcissistic personality.
She has a penchant for death, sadism, torture, and punishment.
In the Netflix series, however, she appears ill at ease with her peers at Nevermore Academy, a spooky school for monstrous misfits in which she unwillingly enrolls.
Her dangerous behavior prompts a court order to issue her mandatory therapy sessions with the therapist Dr. Valerie Kinbott.
What is Therapy? How does
it work? Know all below!
What is Therapy? How does it work? Know all below!
Wednesday’s hesitancy to avail therapy references the stigma that haunts mental health care.
But, as the therapy sessions progress, her character undergoes a change. She becomes more empathetic, less depressed, and more communicative and social.
She even helps her classmates overcome adolescent mental health issues related to misadjustment, trauma, parental abuse, anxiety, grief, sexuality, self-image dissatisfaction, etc.
Wednesday even attends an unlikely ‘family therapy’ session and addresses the resentment she feels towards her family.
Therefore, much like “13 Reasons Why” and “The Midnight Club”, “Wednesday” reinforces the undaunted benefits of therapy, even as early as childhood or adolescence.