As a concept, the “teenager” only really came into being after the Second World War, when child labor laws and compulsory education helped to define the gap between early childhood and adulthood. But by the 1980s, wide swaths of popular culture revolved around teens, as movies like The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Heathers, and The Outsiders (based on S.E. Hinton’s 1967 book, which helped to launch the YA genre) explored the big feelings—discontent with the banality of life, the sense that your parents didn’t, couldn’t, understand you—ushered in by adolescence.
Yet with the 1990s and early 2000s came something slightly different: a deluge of media that pushed into the darker corners of those feelings, and rendered teenagers drowning in something more like anguish. The shift began with The Virgin Suicides and Girl, Interrupted (both books from 1993 that were adapted into movies that premiered in 1999), as well as 1995’s Kids. Post-Y2K brought movies like White Oleander (based on the 1999 novel) and Garden State, a new wave of raw young-adult fiction, and, of course, a new countercultural music scene called emo. Consider the fact that all this happened before the body-positivity movement reached the mainstream, before the #MeToo movement exploded, before gay marriage was legalized, and when it still felt taboo to talk about mental health. The generation that would usher in these major cultural shifts was letting out its first primal scream against the stifling status quo.
In 2002, the children’s publishing company Scholastic launched PUSH, an imprint aimed at teens. Founding editor David Levithan remembers there being an appetite among readers at the time for more “brutal honesty,” something the imprint delivered with books like Cut by Patricia McCormick, which tells the story of a young girl struggling with self-harm in a residential treatment facility called Sea Pines (but known internally as “Sick Minds”).
The public reaction to Cut revealed just how fractured views of mental health were at the turn of the millennium. “We certainly heard from parents, administrators, and teachers who basically thought that their innocent, sheltered child would never in a million years have thought about cutting themselves until the book came into their life,” Levithan recalls. Reader messages on PUSH’s website told a different story. “We got dozens of messages per day from actual readers saying, ‘This book saved me,’ ‘This book made me feel less alone,’ ‘This book encouraged me to get the help that I need,’” Levithan goes on. “It was interesting because from the adults, there was a suspicion that we might be causing the problem, but from the actual teens, we knew that we were actually helping to solve the problem.”
Director Catherine Hardwicke remembers a similar phenomenon surrounding her film Thirteen, which she famously co-wrote with Nikki Reed—then an actual 13-year-old—about her real-life experiences. Depicting two young girls (played by Reed and Evan Rachel Wood) acting out and engaging in drug use and self-harm, Thirteen premiered at Sundance in 2003, and after it was purchased for distribution by Fox Searchlight, the company sent Hardwicke on a multi-city tour.
At the end of each screening, she would sit for a discussion with mental health experts, law enforcement professionals, or others who worked with troubled youth. “This is so exaggerated,” Hardwicke recalls parents saying, only to be shut down by the expert on hand saying, “I think this movie is mild.”
“People were pretend-shocked or mock-shocked,” says Hardwicke, who found the strategy of using the film as a vehicle for conversations about the issues it explored “brilliant.” “It contextualized the film. It [provided an answer to] the outrage of people who were saying, ‘she exaggerated everything and she pushed it and sensationalized it.’ In my mind, I didn t sensationalize it. Either myself or Nikki witnessed everything in that movie firsthand.”
Far outnumbering the grumbling parents were the fans around the world who saw themselves in Thirteen’s gritty characters, and continue to do so over two decades later. (The movie came out 21 years ago this month.) A quick search on TikTok reveals tons of clips from the movie, either from people discovering it for the first time or remembering what it meant to them. “I think it s great, and I think it s a testament to the fact that I wrote it with a 13-year-old girl,” says Hardwicke of the film’s staying power. “It was very raw.”
“Women still come up to me to talk about how meaningful it was to have the experience of watching it with their mom, because it helped to encourage a conversation that needed to be had,” says Reed. “Or it made them feel less alone. Or it inspired them to write. I will never not be surprised by the amount of love and connection surrounding this film.”
The hunger for franker, less polished portrayals of teen life coincided with the dawn of social media, which created spaces where young people could express their big feelings in new ways. Like the readers Levithan heard from, fans of the skyrocketing pop-punk and emo scenes—in which bands like Dashboard Confessional and Taking Back Sunday attracted followings with the writhing drama of their lyrics—found comfort and community on sites like LiveJournal and MySpace. And as the cries of these young fans reached the artists themselves, a new emphasis on mental health took hold in the culture—both in the form of “therapy rock,” as a 2004 New York Times article framed a spate of songs from the time with an explicit message of suicide prevention (see: “Hold On” by Good Charlotte and “Adam’s Song” by Blink 182), and in the presence of mental health-focused charities at concerts and festivals like the Vans Warped Tour.
“Bands would come to us saying, I don t know how to answer our fans’ questions about dealing with depression, suicide, or self-injury. Would y all be able to help?” says Chad Moses, the director of outreach and experience at To Write Love On Her Arms, a nonprofit organization that grew from a viral 2006 Myspace post into a trendy T-shirt slogan worn by bands like Paramore and The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, and then a 501(c)(3) still deeply embedded with the music industry. Today, it offers an online tool to help connect people with mental health providers and scholarship programs.
“In those earliest days, the conversation was really centered on pounding the table and saying it’s about damn time we talk about this,” says Moses, “and it’s been really encouraging to grow up with our audience.” He echoes Levithan and Hardwicke in saying that “authenticity” is what propelled the success of emo and pop-punk back in the ’00s. “It wasn t trying to solve all the problems. It wasn t trying to give out answers.”
For millennials who have observed, in their lifetime, a pointed change in discussions about mental health and therapy, the angsty cultural moment of the early 2000s feels like it was the start of something. We remember the disconnect between our parents’ perception of the movies, books, and music we clung to and the rush we felt upon realizing we were not alone—and we can contrast that with the fact that today, some of the most famous people in the world speak openly about going to therapy.
Reed, now a married mother of two living a peaceful life on a California farm, has noticed this shift since her tumultuous early teens. “One of the most moving aspects of film and TV is that it has the ability to inspire change, and to create a shift in how we choose to engage with so many topics that used to be taboo. More and more young people feel comfortable reaching out and asking for help, which is incredible,” she says. “There is a greater support system because there is an understanding of how common it is to have these human experiences that most of us can’t avoid. I think we show up for each other in ways we didn’t know how to do a few decades ago. We have new tools in our toolbox.”
It feels like we’ve come a long way—but unfortunately, today’s teens are facing a world full of new challenges. Though they are surrounded by the resources—and exposed to the language—it hasn’t necessarily resulted in better mental health outcomes. Social media has changed drastically; what once seemed like a miraculous new forum for connection is killing subcultures and increasing loneliness. Could this be one reason the millennial generation is obsessed with nostalgia? Our teen years—in addition to being gloriously angst-ridden—were also lightning in a bottle.