Emotional Fracture: A Global Symptom
The COVID-19 pandemic not only reshaped daily life but also deeply impacted global mental health. Psychological disorders were already rising due to hyperconnectivity, digital pressure, job insecurity, and social isolation. The health emergency intensified this invisible crisis. Lockdowns, mass grief, economic uncertainty, and ruptured human contact formed an emotionally fragile backdrop.
According to the Mundo Salud Organization, anxiety and depression cases surged by 25% globally post-pandemic, disproportionately affecting youth, women, and marginalized groups. Mental health systems collapsed in 93% of member countries. Beyond statistics, a collective psychopathology surfaced—a universal unease that was unevenly distributed, hitting hardest in the Global South and households lacking support networks.
In parallel, streaming became both refuge and emotional mirror. Netflix gained over 36 million new subscribers in 2020; HBO Max, Prime Videoy Disney+ experienced exponential growth. Screens became more than entertainment—they offered solace, companionship, and a channel for expression. Mental health themes like depression, anxiety, insomnia, burnout, grief, personality disorders, and addiction transitioned from subplots to narrative cores.
This shift wasn’t just a response to reality—it reflected a symbolic need to recognize shared vulnerability. Mental health entered popular culture. People talk about therapy, trauma, and anxiety across social media, music, and fictional dialogues. Clinical language became part of everyday expression.
Yet visibility has its dualities. While it destigmatizes, it can also trivialize or commodify suffering. In this context, shows that portray psychological distress with honesty foster deep connections. Audiences now seek broken, relatable, emotionally nuanced characters—not invulnerable heroes.
Depression: The Everyday Abyss
Depression has become one of the most explored and complex topics in today’s audiovisual landscape. It reflects a cultural contradiction: the demand for constant happiness versus the lived experience of prolonged suffering. Clinically, it’s defined as a mood disorder marked by vital exhaustion, anhedonia, and hopelessness. Narratively, it has evolved into a structural symbol of a time that forbids sadness.
Streaming representations vary widely. In BoJack Horseman, an anthropomorphic horse navigates emptiness, self-deception, emotional abuse, and the collapse of meaningful relationships. The show refuses redemption arcs, instead revealing that psychological decay stems from broken systems and cycles of self-destruction.
In After Life, Ricky Gervais plays a widower contemplating suicide. Depression appears as detachment, cynicism, and loss of purpose. The series avoids sentimental resolutions—Tony survives not by choice, but because he can’t bring himself to end it. Dry humor coexists with raw, unresolved sadness.
Normal People, adapted from Sally Rooney’s novel, presents a generational portrait. Connell (Paul Mescal) silently endures a depressive episode. The show captures emotional collapse and the challenge of seeking help, especially in cultures that link masculinity to silence and control.
In Russian Doll, reliving the same day symbolizes trauma and emotional paralysis. Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) confronts guilt and patterns tied to submerged sadness. Depression is loop, mental entrapment, and the inability to move forward. Happy!, through dark comedy, portrays utter despair. Ex-cop Nick Sax (Christopher Meloni) hallucinates a unicorn after overdosing. The show’s absurdity reflects a world so violent that fantasy seems saner than reality.
Controversial 13 Reasons Why addresses teen suicide rooted in layered violence—bullying, abuse, loneliness. Despite criticisms, it sparked discussions on mental health and institutional neglect. Euphoria presents depression as diffuse and corrosive. Though often linked to addiction, the show focuses on Rue’s emotional void. She doesn’t want to die but lacks tools to live. The series uses narration and silence to immerse viewers in a psyche marked by structural sadness.
Baby Reindeer explores how depression can stem from unprocessed abuse and shame. Donny (Richard Gadd), a comedian harassed by a woman, unearths layers of buried trauma. His depression isn’t caused by the stalking but by a history of childhood sexual abuse. Here, depression is the lingering silence of unspeakable pain.
In Atypical, depression emerges in Elsa, the protagonist’s mother, who questions her identity after years of caregiving. The series challenges the notion that only major trauma triggers emotional collapse. Maniac, starring Jonah Hill and Emma Stone, imagines a dystopia where emotions are chemically suppressed. It asks whether erasing pain creates functionality or emptiness. Its surrealism underscores a harsh truth: depression isn’t cured by shortcuts, only by facing what hurts.
These shows avoid glamorizing depression. They portray it not merely as a diagnosis but as an existential condition. In the streaming era, sadness has become visible—it’s named, embodied, and woven into the emotional grammar of a generation unafraid to expose its cracks.
Anxiety: The Inner Noise
If depression manifests as emotional numbness and retreat, anxiety is its frantic counterpart—a flood of thought, a hyper-awareness that anticipates failure, fears rejection, and conjures invisible threats. Post-pandemic, anxiety has solidified its position as the dominant emotional state. It reveals itself through insomnia, muscle tension, hypervigilance, and emotional fatigue. While depression paralyzes, anxiety exhausts.
Streaming series have evolved in their portrayal of anxiety, moving from surface-level nervousness to a deeper audiovisual representation of what it feels like to live in constant alertness. Shows no longer simply depict anxious characters—they recreate the internal storm.
In Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s protagonist deals with emotional chaos and unspoken grief. Her constant breaking of the fourth wall isn’t just comedic; it’s a reflection of social anxiety and the compulsive need to manage others’ perceptions. The audience becomes both confidant and mirror to her internal unrest.
The Bear plunges viewers into the sensory overload of a high-pressure kitchen. Carmy, a fine-dining chef now managing a family restaurant after his brother’s suicide, navigates unresolved trauma through relentless movement. Tight shots, overlapping dialogue, and fast-paced editing mimic the overwhelming nature of anxiety without naming it.
In Feel Good, Mae Martin presents a character juggling trauma, addiction, gender identity, and romantic entanglements. Panic attacks, sleepless nights, and emotional spirals reveal how anxiety stems not from weakness but from unhealed wounds. The narrative doesn’t ask for pity—it demands understanding.
Undone, animated using rotoscope, explores anxiety as a warping of time and identity. Alma begins experiencing time loops after a car accident. The series blurs reality and mental collapse, questioning whether anxiety is pathology or a heightened awareness of the world’s chaos.
Big Mouth personifies anxiety as a mosquito that buzzes toxic thoughts into teenagers’ heads. The absurdity of the image doesn’t trivialize the experience—it highlights the insidiousness of self-doubt and fear. Even in animated comedy, the series validates the emotional reality of its viewers.
Transparent offers a more systemic view. Anxiety permeates the Pfefferman family through hypochondria, emotional volatility, and existential dread. It’s not individual—it’s generational, entangled in love and legacy. Similarly, Dying for Sex presents philosophical anxiety: Molly, diagnosed with terminal cancer, reclaims her body and desire in the face of mortality. Her story asks how we live with knowledge of our fragility.
These portrayals don’t offer solutions. They do something subtler: they name and legitimize a collective condition. By reflecting this unease, streaming series become tools of emotional recognition. In naming anxiety, they help us survive it.
The Therapist at the Edge: Mental Health in the Consultation Room
In recent years, a new narrative trend has gained momentum: not only representing those who live with anxiety or depression, but also exploring the inner lives of the professionals who accompany them. Psychologists, psychiatrists, and therapists have moved from supporting roles to complex protagonists, full of contradictions and emotional wounds of their own.
Sex Education, while not centered solely on therapy, was among the first to introduce a nuanced view of adolescent counseling, desire, identity, and trauma. Jean Milburn (Gillian Anderson), a sex therapist and mother, is shown in professional and personal crisis. She’s not an infallible authority but a woman facing loneliness and vulnerability. The show takes time to depict her emotional conflicts, making the therapist figure more relatable and humane.
Shrinking, co-created by Brett Goldstein and Jason Segel (who also stars), pushes this further. Jimmy, a therapist grieving his wife’s death, starts breaking clinical rules by telling patients exactly what he thinks. What begins as a quirky comedy evolves into a poignant study of grief, guilt, and reconnection. Jimmy’s anxiety is existential—how can one keep helping others while falling apart? The show turns therapy into mutual vulnerability.
The Pitt, a drama set in a high-pressure university hospital, doesn’t focus exclusively on mental health but delivers one of the most powerful depictions of emotional burnout among medical staff. Doctors face constant emergencies, ethical dilemmas, systemic failures, and personal breakdowns. The hospital becomes a zone of emotional sacrifice. Even trained professionals can crack, revealing how institutions often drain compassion to the brink of collapse.
These stories reinforce a powerful idea: mental health professionals are not invulnerable—they’re humans navigating the same storms as those they assist. By embracing their fragility, series like these offer not a diminished but a more ethical, grounded image of therapeutic care. Watching the helper struggle can be a source of solace too.
We live in a time where pain is visible yet marketable. Fiction’s task is not to resolve it but to narrate it with dignity. In doing so, these stories may offer the earliest signs of collective healing.
