Gen Z athletes “reduce” mental health with care and compassion, not condescension

Nobody wants to grow up these days.

This epidemic shook the minds of teenage girls. Uncontrolled social media is a hindrance to youth development. The world is burning and wars are raging. The same is true of young people these days indeed to be young?

The Apple TV+ comedy series “Shrinking” addresses some of these concerns with its young character, Alice (Lukita Maxwell). In the half-hour comedy, Alice is the teenage daughter of a grieving doctor, Jimmy (Jason Segel). As the show begins, Alice and Jimmy are left reeling from the fall of their mother and their wife, Tia’s (Lilan Bowden) sudden death in a car accident. As Jimmy sinks in his grief, Alice keeps him afloat by being a foster child, even though she is also losing her breath.

In the second season of “Shrinking,” after some much-needed healing, Jimmy is back at work as a father. He gained some of Alice’s trust after working to repair the father-daughter relationship in the first season. So Alice leaves to take care of her father out of her grief. But the show doesn’t shy away from Alice’s small concern about her father’s weakness as she allows the teenager to embarrass her mother in light and painful moments. “Decreasing” gives its audience a raw look at the sadness and mental illness of a teenager and deals with it with honesty and sometimes a little recklessness.

When the audience is first introduced to Alice, she is confused. The young man is an expert at hiding his pain because there is no place for it in his home, due to the fact that his father was immersed in his grief. He is partying hard, hooking up with sex traffickers and has given up on life. They live in two separate things, and one is a lonely, singular experience of grief. He told her in the first season that washing his football jersey when it was dirty or giving him blueberries wasn’t enough to fix what was broken. She explains, “You’ve been walking around for a long time acting like it only happened to you, but it happened to us. It happened to me and I’ve been dealing with it alone because I had to to do so.” Clearly, her mental health was not her father’s priority. The audience sees glimpses of Alice’s stress and rash decisions in her first year, but in the end she’s still a child who had to grow up too quickly.

However, his words struck a chord with Jimmy. She has completely abandoned her teenage daughter in the midst of both of their losses. His emotional absence pushes him closer to their dim neighbor Liz (Christa Miller), her husband, Derek (Ted McGinley) and Paul (Harrison Ford), a senior doctor and colleague of the father of home. Although he was helped by his community, he still feels that he is not a normal teenager. When his friend asks him to drink alcohol under the bridge, he asks the young people to Paul because “they all behave in an unstable way.” He explains to her that not all young people have suffered like him. Paul pushes him to enjoy his youth, saying, “Will you let your sorrows drown you?”

So he doesn’t. But it’s not long into the second season where all of Alice’s defenses come down. He seems to be in a better, healed place. Alice and Jimmy’s relationship is now healthy. But with progress, comes growing pains. During their mini-therapy session, she admits to Paul that she has been watching her father sleep because she “couldn’t stop thinking that he would go back to the way he was after death mother’s.” Alice takes care of Jimmy even when he doesn’t. It’s the strength that comes from what he’s been through, Paul tells him. But in the first few episodes, “The Decline” cuts through Alice’s constant concern for other people, and takes her to the core of teenage angst and angst.

One of these young people’s worries is passing his driver’s license test, which he obviously takes by car. It is not lost on the audience that the very thing that caused Tia’s death is something that Alice needs to know. The youngster even started to remember clearly when his mother drove him to practice football. He seems to be troubled by his mother’s love and the brevity of his life. His grieving unjustly destroys what is supposed to be a normal, young experience for him.

On the other hand, Jimmy faces the hard truth – Louis, the drunk driver who killed Tia, played by “Shrinking” writer/producer Brett Goldstein. It’s a destabilizing development, but the program is handling it carefully. Jimmy struggles to tell Alice and in a moment of dark comedy, blurts out, “You talk about cars, do you remember what happened to your mother in one? Godd**nit!”

Alice seems to be handling things well, despite saying “Lately I feel like my brain is about to explode.”

“You ruined my life you piece of s**t. Eat my a**!” he writes a letter to Louis.

Alice even shows Paul a letter, and says, “Just a letter. Lots of F-bombs.” He replies, “Well, it’s not my congressman. It’s the guy who killed my mother!” His ability to handle these feelings of swallowing with grace is a sign that he is doing the treatment the way he should, but that doesn’t mean it’s working, or maybe he’s just too slow to fix it. feeling irrevocably broken. With his new driver’s license, he does something unexpected, possibly wrong. She goes to see the guy who killed her mother – twice.

Reluctantly, Alice goes to Louis’s work and confronts him against Paul’s warning to see him again. Immediately, Alice gets fired up and tries to defuse the situation by telling her that she can imagine how she feels. He shouts in the coffee shop, “Shut up! Shut the f**k up! F**k you!” To his horror he threw his hands on the table and stormed out. Alice is completely devastated and seeks comfort from Liz’s son, Connor, who is also in a relationship with Alice and her best friend’s boyfriend.

In true teenage fashion, Alice’s impulsiveness led her to make bad decisions but “Shrinking” never scolds her for her pain or her choices. Instead, the text chooses to make him the young man he is – a young man who has not been able to deal with his grief. It’s a refreshing look at how a teenager fights against insurmountable odds. In a young generation with mental health issues, Alice is like any other 17-year-old girl. She’s just dealing with what feels like the weight of the world on her shoulders as best she can.