I just finished it. It took me a while to get through--couldn't straight binge it. It had a lot of build up, and I struggled a bit with the framing of the story.
But I ended up enjoying it in its totality.
I think the part about the counselor (unless high schools have changed) is probably more relevant to how colleges in the US handle sexual assault. I agree with the above, in that I believe my guidance counselors did things like attendance. I actually did go to a guidance counselor once for help, asking if I could do school from home and I just got a "No."
There was something about her narration that seemed discordant with being suicidal to me. It wasn't until they showed the suicide that I had sort of a realization. Her mind was appropriately mature for her age, but I think that relative immaturity led to my not understanding the level of her despair until I saw the actual suicide. Her affect in the narration was sort of cheery almost, but then you see the suicide and have a sense of the psychic pain that I guess I would have assumed would appear more despondently, and maybe it does in older people. Maybe this was very accurate of how it would present in a younger person. Plus, the encounter with the counselor and the realization she would have to continue facing her rapist accelerated the understanding of the suicide. Up until they showed that, it seemed more like an act of hurting others.
But even without that last part, I do remember moving to a new town in sixth grade and through 12th grade (and really actually until moving out of that town), having the sense of living in a fish bowl (almost literally, I had a bully who at school would tell people he could see me getting undressed in my room because my blinds showed my silhouette---somehow that made me the weird one rather than him watching me). I remember my own experiences of trying to keep a lot to myself and that sense of "audience" (being on display, everyone watching).
I think that there is something unnatural about the stratification of people socially by age, as we have in schools. Humans used to live tribally. Young babies through children of all ages were mixed with adults in occupations, tribes, etc. You had apprentices and journeymen. Nomadic groups where the family stayed as a single unit. Basically more heterogeneity of age.
You could see in the show the disconnect between the children and the parents, and I think we take that as some sort of inherent human norm. I don't think it is. I think it's just this particular culture at this particular moment. The adults go to work with adults their age. The kids go to school with kids their age.
I think when you take people of a singular age of particular volatility (teenagers) and combine them into needlessly long interactions with only each other, it's problematic. I mean if you think back on your middle through high school experience, at least for me, a lot of that education could have been distilled down to shorter days, fewer days of the week, and fewer years. A lot of it just seems like a petri dish for problems and not much happening that is terribly constructive. I mean after all that, what do you have to show for it? A high school degree, that is worth what exactly? Not much. There must be a better idea of what to do with the teenage years. It seems unnecessarily drawn out where people have no sense of a goal, like life isn't supposed to actually start until graduation, and in the mean time you have this idle time with a lot of exactly what you'd expect.
I mean when you step back and look at the show, what the hell were these kids doing? The types of things you'd do if you had nothing else to do. They needed something to do. I know the show is unrealistic for a lot of high school students, but it presents an exaggeration rather than an untruth.
