The Bear is a show about a gifted chef who comes home to save his family's sandwich shop after his brother's death. The intense dramedy is a meditation on the grind and joy of cooking, a portrayal of bittersweet relationships, and an examination of both tender and violent masculinity. The bear is about suicide loss survivors.
This is not advertised. The show focuses on its take on restaurant life. Every major character is grieving the loss of a loved one. Mike ran the Original Beef of Chicagoland with his brother Carmy.
Carmy is still reeling from his brother's suicide. Mike's best friend and lieutenant at The Beef mentioned addiction. Carmy confronted a mountain of debt while sorting through Mike's paperwork. Substance use disorders and financial strain are related to suicide. Carmy's journey through grief and guilt is familiar to suicide loss survivors.
She had no idea that The Bear was about suicide loss. She remembers a review that promised a fast-paced tour of a chaotic kitchen.
Two years ago, her 20-year-old son took his own life. The nature of Mike's death was revealed in the beginning of the show. She is careful about which depictions of suicide she sees.
When it's handled well, it matters. I don't feel like I'm alone when it's depicted in a way that isn't stigmatizing.
Major storylines about suicide loss can be found in a number of television shows. Much of the title character's anguish was in the unresolved grief of her son's suicide. The second season of Ted Lasso showed that the title character's father died by suicide and brought new complexity to Ted's insistence on kindness as a way of life. The show about a close-knit group of Native teenagers living on an Oklahoma reservation is about grief of all sorts, but particularly the sort that affects a community when a young person dies by suicide.
The shows don't make suicide loss a catalyst for growth. They don't portray surviving a suicide loss in a stereotypical way. Approximately 5 million people in the US are exposed to suicide loss each year.
These shows don't make suicide loss simply a dramatic catalyst for another character's growth.
The director of writing and entertainment outreach at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is excited by the number of shows taking on the topic of suicide loss.
"These shows have their own unique artistic voices, allowing them to explore this issue in different ways," Wean wrote in an email.
He likes when storylines about suicide aren't limited to a single episode only to be forgotten as soon as possible. Some of the showsweave suicide loss and mental health into the fabric of the characters' lives.
The Native writers of Reservation Dogs brought their own personal experiences of loss to the table when they decided to tell the story of a youth suicide. In the U.S., the suicide rate for Indigenous people is the highest. Mental illness, family violence, and historical trauma were some of the risk factors that the writers signaled, but did not assign a cause for Daniel's death.
Chavez says that colonization is what the boy is dealing with. We walk around with a deep pit of pain for what has happened to our people and our communities.
Some of Daniel's belongings are part of a shrine assembled by his friends. He will be honored with a trip to California. Willie Jack has a portrait of Daniel on the wall in her home. Some people think that they were the last to see Daniel, and that they wished to have done things differently. There is no one who blames Daniel for taking his own life.
Chavez says they don't want anyone to feel shamed.
In the second season, Bear had an exchange with a spirit in a portable toilet about needing to move on from his grief.
Are you going to get over it? I'm not sure what to think. The spirit says that you haven't even gone through it. We grieve for those that we lost. We cut our hair while mourning them. We took ourselves out. We are going through all the feelings. We build ourselves new on the other side by tearing ourselves apart. You make sure that they know that they can go, that we'll miss them, but that we'll be alright without them.
There is a universal sentiment of sorrow in this exchange, but it is not the same as the therapists' offices where the title characters of Mare of Easttown and Ted Lasso confront their buried grief, or the Al-Anon meeting where Carmy gives a.
Wean saidReservation Dogs shows how a whole community of people has been affected.
The shows show that the person who died was complex and that grief drives storylines about suicide loss. A loss survivor used to be depicted in one-dimensional ways of the dead.
Both Reservation Dogs and The Bear show Daniel and Mike smiling. The major flashback of Mike showed him as a happy man who cooked and joked with his siblings. Carmy and the chef from Original Beef had a tender exchange.
Everyone around him was very fond of him. The focus was on that, and not on his death, which is something that survivors are constantly battling.
A suicide loss survivor who hasn't watched either show yet, would like fictional representations of suicide to incorporate the emotional complexity of what happens after the death. There can be anger at the person or the circumstances that increased the person's suicide risk, but there can also be post traumatic growth, rituals that honor the deceased in loving ways, and newfound happiness as a survivor rebuilds their life.
"One of the things I wish we did better at in all forms of media is including the happy memories and the love that is part of the grieving process."
Heilmann, who lost her sister a decade ago and now works in the Office of Suicide Prevention at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, says that fictional depictions can help people who have not experienced a suicide loss.
Television writers are still wrestling with the issue of whether to show the death or not. Carmy pantomimes his brother's death once. Ted Lasso talked to his therapist about his father's death. The death isn't put on screen.
The preference is not to describe the method, but it is in line with evidence-based guidelines not to show the death in an effort to reduce the spread of the disease. There are shots of the character's body in Reservation Dogs. The method is clear. Loss survivors may be at increased risk for suicide following a loss.
Chavez said that the writers wanted to avoid glamorizing or romanticizing the death, or giving the impression that suicide would be a "painless" moment of release. Daniel's loved ones are not fully embodied in the current moment, a choice the writers made to avoid leaving young viewers feeling like they can die by suicide. Chavez felt showing the death was important to the impact of Daniel's death.
In a visual medium, it can be difficult to convince writers and producers that omitting the method is about responsible storytelling rather than shying away from difficult material.
"These shows help model healthy, open conversations, and let viewers know there is support available for survivors of suicide loss."
"If they're genuinely, deeply exploring the topic of suicide loss, the depth of that story isn't contained in the graphic moments," Wean wrote.
Reservation Dogs' sensitivity towards the subject helped balance the explicit albeit brief scene of Daniel's death, which appears in the seventh episode of the first season, and recurs in the second season.
A content warning at the beginning and crisis support resources at the end are recommended by Wean. The show warns about sensitive material at the beginning of the episode. The conclusion encourages viewers to "Take action for yourself and be there for others" and gives the number for the 988 Suicide & Crisis Hotline.
The Bear, Reservation Dogs, Ted Lasso, and Mare of Easttown all feature depictions of people who have experienced suicide loss.
The shows help model healthy, open conversations and let viewers know there is support available for survivors of suicide loss.
Please talk to someone if you are feeling depressed or suicidal. You can call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Hotline at 988, or the Trans Lifeline at (877) 565-8860. Text the word "start" to 741-741. The help line is open from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. on Mondays through Fridays. Email info@nami.org You can use the 988 Suicide and Crisis Hotline at crisischat.org if you don't want to use the phone. International resources are listed here.
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