Brought to you by the VeleBit team, we take a look around the world of fiction, exploring its merits and de-merits, particularly its effects on us teenagers.
Rolling the clock back to 2017, when Netflix’s famous show ’13 Reasons Why’ was released depicting the life of a teenager who decided to take her own life, educators and psychologists warned the program could lead to copycat suicides. Now, a study(as of 2019) funded by the National Institutes of Health shows that these concerns may have been warranted.
In the month following the show’s debut in March 2017, there was a 28.9% increase in suicide among Americans ages 10-17, said the study, published in the ‘Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’. The number of suicides was greater than that seen in any single month over the 5-year period researchers examined. Over the rest of the year, there were 195 more youth suicides than expected given historical trends.
This sparks a thought among people, to question that, is fiction safe, are its effects perpetual, does it make a person precocious, or would you become receptive to any other meaning.
Stories are always more information than that some poor kid must labor to understand. A story is a world …. both radiant and real - a world into which the child is invited and they enter. While relating to protagonist’ experiences is common, some readers oftenly tend to over-identify with the fictional characters — and not in a good way. Feeling empathy for characters profusely, in crisis situations can be detrimental. Some go beyond worrying on characters’ behalf and visualize themselves in the frequently unfortunate, troubling, or hopeless circumstances.
When individuals over-identify with characters, they cultivate unrealistic expectations of people and situations. Worse still is the situation in which a person starts emulating negative behaviours and adopting destructive viewpoints encountered via fiction -- be it drugs, violence, chauvinism, or racist attitudes.
While reading or watching fiction is also found to be a habit healthy for ones brain and holistic development, its effects are always dependent on the maturity of the person, their past exposure to fiction and the level of vulnerability of their brain to absorb the rather beguiling world fiction has to offer. Then and now, we think about characters and plot-lines long after the tale is closed, escaping personal drudgery for a while. According to various psychologists, the brain takes a heavier toll when we intentionally pick a plot and force our-selves into accepting the form of the shown protagonist, meticulously.
This also doesn’t mean that fiction should be disdained, for it is art, and everyone fosters their own meaning to it. In this case, us young people shan’t trick ourselves into relating to the plot intentionall , rather try to grow a more mature outlook to it. As people say “ All problems are illusions of our mind", docking the ship , I believe that it's safe to say that its all based on ones perspective.
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