Adolescence

🎬 Mental Health in the Wild 🎬

Adolescence swept the Emmys last year. And it deserved every single one.

For those who haven't seen it: it's a 4-episode Netflix miniseries, each episode filmed in a single continuous take (no cuts, no edits, nowhere to hide).

A 13-year-old boy named Jamie is arrested for a violent crime against a classmate. Over four episodes, we watch his family, his school, and the systems around him try to make sense of what happened.

The show doesn't sensationalize. It does something harder. It shows you a child's bedroom with a space duvet and toys on the shelf, and asks you to reconcile that image with what this kid did. It's deeply uncomfortable.

And that's the point.

What stayed with me most is a scene where Jamie, sitting across from a therapist, asks: "Do you like me?"

Not the therapist asking him. The child asking the therapist. A 13-year-old who has done something terrible, looking for the one thing he clearly never learned how to find on his own: acceptance and validation.

Jamie didn't wake up one day and choose violence. He's a kid who couldn't express what he was feeling, couldn't tell right from wrong in the way adults assume kids can, and got pulled into a world of online content that gave his confusion a target. Manosphere forums, incel rhetoric, toxic ideas about masculinity. All fed to him by algorithms, all consumed in a bedroom his parents walked past every day.

Jamie's parents aren't neglectful. They're present. They eat dinner together. They clearly love their son. And they had absolutely no idea.

This is where I kept coming back to one question. We mandate Physical Education in schools. We mandate science, maths, languages. If we accept that a child's body needs structured development, why do we treat their mind as something that'll just figure itself out?

A 13-year-old's prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, consequences, long-term thinking) won't be fully developed for another 12 years. We know this. The neuroscience is settled. And yet we hand them devices with infinite reach and zero guardrails, then act surprised when something goes wrong.

This show forced me to sit with an uncomfortable question: are we intervening early enough?

By the time a kid is sitting across from a therapist, so much has already happened. The real work might need to start before the crisis, before the signs.

If you've watched Adolescence, I'd genuinely love to hear what stayed with you. And if you haven't, clear four hours this weekend. You won't be the same after.