What We Can Learn From Eighth Grade's Anxiety-Afflicted Teen Heroine

"Sorry, some days I can be a little bit. I suffer from anxiety," blurts Ariela Barer as Gert in the Season 1 finale of Marvel's Runaways.


Fans immediately took to Twitter to praise the simplicity of the admission, one that made so much sense in retrospect, nevertheless hadn't been stated in any of the nine previous episodes. "This meant so much to me for so several reasons," one wrote.


Mental health awareness has been getting a lot of attention in pop culture lately, with depictions in TV shows, movies, and music. Once they’re done well, these representations can blur the line between a story and real life — which is why they can be so powerful for those who suffer and thus uncomfortable for those who don’t.


Take, as an example, the controversy surrounding 13 Reasons Why. While some lauded the show as painfully relatable, others condemned it as dangerous and called for its cancellation following graphic scenes of sexual assault, suicide, and violence.


Despite the debate, the show’s cast and creators consistently insist they’re overjoyed of the conversation the show has sparked. “I think ultimately what the show does really well is promote discussion,” star Katherine Langford told BuzzFeed News ahead of Season 2’s release, “and I think from discussion is where folks are able to learn.”


She’s not wrong — getting a conversation began is “helpful,” Kevin Menasco, a therapist at Mountain Valley Treatment Center, told MTV News, although is that enough?


“It’s only going to open up conversations insofar as it’s an accurate representation of that population,” Menasco added, and statistically speaking, extreme cases of depression and anxiety brought on by a pile-up of bullying, harassment, and sexual violence isn’t the experience of most teens suffering from mental illness. Ultimately, he mentioned, this representation can encourage us to “view mental health much less on a spectrum of health and more in terms of black and white.”


Fortunately, more nuanced portrayals of mental health are becoming more usual — in shows like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, in books like John Green’s Turtles All of the Way Down, and right now, in Bo Burnham’s directorial debut, Eighth Grade, which correctly outlines how we can be better allies to our anxious peers.


Much like Green setting out to write about the experience of life with OCD, Burnham “wanted to talk about anxiety—my own anxiety—and I was coming to grips with that,” he told the New Yorker, which, he later described, “[it] makes me feel like a terrified thirteen-year-old.”


The movie follows eighth grader Kayla (Elsie Fisher) as she struggles to create companions, awkwardly talks to men, obsessively scrolls through her Instagram feed and is, overall, “really, like, nervous all of the time."


although Burnham considers this to be a story about anxiety, the word never comes up in the movie, leaving that assessment up to the viewer — a practice in film and TV that “can be really positive,” Menasco mentioned. “A diagnosis isn't as significant or crucial because the assortment of indications, and I think that [the symptoms] are the things that people can relate to.”


Even more significantly, sympathizing with a character as she navigates through these emotional experiences and seeing how various interactions affect her will help prepare each person to better empathize with these situations any time if they arise in real life.


as an example, in the starting of Eighth Grade, Kayla rejects her quiet reputation, telling her (dismal) YouTube audience, “I don’t talk a lot at school, nevertheless if people discussed to me and stuff, they’d find out that I’m like, really funny and cool and talkative.”


As we visualize while in the film, having her peers don't think about her earnest attempts to create companions is one of Kayla’s most consistent insecurities, resulting in increased nerves on her end and so making her peers even much less interested in talking her.


categorize in attempt to avoid that real-life rejection, Kayla spends hours a day scrolling through social media, which, according to Menasco, can further inhibit the "social learning" we all need, while also allowing her to compare her lonely nights at house to the friend-filled weekends of her peers, leading to a "sense of inadequacy that maybe we aren’t doing enough or achieving enough or having a good enough life." (Studies have shown that people who spend more than two hours a day on social media are more likely to feel socially isolated.)


It turns out, there’s an easy fix to break this cycle. “Just listen,” Jeanette Nogales, Co-worker Clinical Director of MVTC mentioned. “Listen to people, listen to each other, and try and take a nonjudgmental stance and really be open to what they have to say.”


To illustrate, Kayla experiences an openness she hadn’t acquired from her classmates before with high schooler Olivia (Emily Robinson) as they chat about the transition from middle school to high school. As soon as Olivia tells Kayla she “was a complete disaster As soon as I was your age,” the middle schooler’s relief is palpable, because for the initial time, Kayla is realizing that maybe things can get better for her.


“We some days forget that everybody experiences anxiety in some form and it’s pretty usual to get anxious about things,” Nogales mentioned. “There’s a crucial piece to [validating each other].”


Realistically, every teen who is suffering from anxiety probably is aware someone else who is also suffering. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, over 30 percent of adolescents suffer from an anxiety disorder. “So, in case you go to school and mention you have 30 people in your class, that insinuates 7-10 of these are also struggling with anxiety in a very real way,” Dr. Shannon Bennett, Clinical Site Director of the New York-Presbyterian Youth Anxiety Center, translated.


Yet not every teen is as brave as Kayla is while she walks into a pool party she was barely invited to, knowing that she’d be subjected to glares that wondered, Why is she here?


The expectations could have inspired Kayla to feed her inclination to isolate herself — and so they categorize kind of did, with her posting up in a untouched edge of the pool. Although then perky Gabe (Jake Ryan) swam over and challenged her to a breath-holding competition.


Unknowingly, Gabe did exactly what he required to do to pull Kayla out of her shell. “People who are struggling with anxiety may not routinely reach out for support,” Nogales mentioned, adding that prompting can really help a person open up.


Plus, being inquisitive can have a dual benefit. Noting that each person experiences emotions and reacts to situations differently, Dr. Bennett mentioned that asking questions is a “really supportive practice … so that we can broaden our view of how other people experience the world and know how best to help one another.”


obviously, all of this isn't to mention that we are obligated to help every person we think may be struggling, nor should anyone expect to be heard all of the time. “That’s piece of life,” MVTC’s Clinical Director Tim DiGiacomo mentioned. “But we then as society can also make the choice day-to-day to mention, ‘Am I going to reach out to someone?’ … So I think it’s the little choices during the day.”


And eventually, all those little choices may result in big changes. It did for Kayla, who will enter ninth grade a little bit much less, like, nervous all of the time.