I’ve just rewatched skam españa’s last clip (”You’re scaring me”), where Joana confesses to Cris that she has BPD on her own terms, and something has irked me so much reading the comments, something that it’s to be expected yet such a telling sign at the same time: the section is full of people screaming at Cris, angry and frustrated that she did not answer, that she stood there, that she didn’t sweep Joana off her feet immediately —specially in her case, where there isn’t any previous link to mental illness so she doesn’t have a bad experience that clouds or biases her judgement, almost to the point of even calling her a bad or uncaring person. And let me tell you: this is not true. Because Cris knows things about MI. They are just all wrong, and misguided, because there’s no true and honest representation in media for young people at all. People with this kind of mental illnesses (depression has a little more rep, for these two it’s almost non-existent) are often relegated to secondary characters; writers make plot-twists out of their situation, a source to milk drama from, but they’re never the focal point. It’s never their story we delve in, their life we try to unravel. We constantly consume their stories as dramatic turning points, a hardship for the main character to deal with, so the only thing that gets through is the charicature of the concept of the MI itself, but never the full experience, the full truth. And you can’t blame Cris for her actions, because that reaction is a real as it gets —she isn’t educated and she’s scared and she doesn’t know what to do, because everything feels strange and dark and like the floor is suddenly melting beneath her feet.
Cris’ reaction is one of the billion of the ways in which the stygmatization of mental illness at a social level manifests, without giving it a chance to be explained, to be understood in all of its scope. And we could blame Cris, sure, for her reaction. But there’s a thing we can actually do collectively that would do way more good: do better. Demand better. And it should start here, in this skam community, so open and safe. It should start with making justice for these stories, press for actual truthful and honest representation, to stop accepting them just as background. To tell them, bring light to them when no else does.
I don’t even care which one —Eliott, Nico, Joana. I truly don’t care. We need an Even season. We need to live through the experience of a mentally ill person breathing, dealing with stuff, their thoughts, ideas, crisis, their suicidal ideation, their psychiatric sessions, the medication and their relationship with it, their coping mechanisms, their pain, their happiness, their daily life. Euthymic periods in bipolar where everything’s stable, to which point BPD conditions the way you think and feel and how the slightest emotional cut can turn into a full-on hemorrhage until there’s screams and tears and the pain, specially the pain they go through. Because the people they’re with suffer, and it’s hard, really hard sometimes, and I wouldn’t be writing this if I hadn’t experienced this myself, but they suffer too. They suffer not only the MI, but the emotional guilt of burdening others with it, and things do get rough. But they’re also beautiful, and tender, and that story deserves to be told —specially in our context, where no one out there is telling them, no one is educating the younger audiences. Even was never just a romantic counterpart, or a plot-twist. And we should fight for a season that proves just how important and fundamental his story is to try and make society understand, so there’s no more Joanas that are left with no answer just because society taught us nothing but misconceptions and fear, even when we were actually ready and willing to listen.
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