“If you were presented with a life threatening situation, would you make an effort to save yourself?” That’s a query a therapist may ask you after you disclose suicidal ideation. It additionally occurs to be the thesis assertion of Max Mayfield’s journey via grief within the fourth season of Netflix’s Stranger Things. Max’s storyline is a poignant exploration of complicated grief, nevertheless it’s additionally one which sends a harmful message.

Stranger Things has all the time scratched an itch for me. I’ve fond reminiscences of watching your entire first season in a single sitting the day that it was launched almost eight years in the past. I’ve all the time been deeply fascinated by the present’s Lovecraftian method to science fiction, however the purpose I gravitate towards the present with the discharge of each season is that it in some way manages to create and maintain characters that really feel actual and grounded in themselves whether or not the demons they’re going through are interpersonal or otherworldly.

The present’s second season launched Maxine “Max” Mayfield—performed by newcomer Sadie Sink—a tomboy who moved from California to Hawkins, Indiana. Despite some preliminary turbulence, Max is ready to discover some respite from her disagreeable residence life and aggressive (and arguably abusive) older half-brother Billy (Dacre Montgomery) by becoming a member of the present’s core group of tween heroes as they galavant throughout Hawkins battling the Upside Down. Max is painted as an island after we first meet her—she skateboards in solitude, she’s defensive, and he or she has nobody to go trick-or-treating with—however by befriending the primary solid, she finds a neighborhood to depend on and at last really feel like she’s a part of a household.

Two seasons and three in-show years later, Max is struggling nightmares and bouts of despair after witnessing Billy’s loss of life by the hands of a monster from the Upside Down just a few months prior. Max and her mom, who’s now single and an alcoholic after splitting with Billy’s father, have moved right into a trailer park throughout city. Max has additionally efficiently pushed away her pals and boyfriend Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin) whereas discovering consolation within the heartbreaking lyrics of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” which eerily mirror her experiences with grief. She’s an island once more. Max is 15 years outdated in Stranger Things’ fourth season—across the age that I started experiencing despair, which I wouldn’t be formally recognized with for one more 5 years. The humorous factor about despair is that it’s amorphous: it’s not unhappiness, it’s simply ache at its most primal and terrifying kind. People with despair don’t push family members away out of contempt, we push them away as a result of we’re drained, we’re scared, we’re hurting, and we’re attempting to guard ourselves from additional ache. We’re islands.

Depression has results on the thoughts and the physique. Lack of sleep and urge for food are widespread bodily signs, however psychological sickness additionally essentially adjustments an individual’s mind chemistry, forcing you to see the world in a totally totally different manner—virtually like your individual, private Upside Down. This new world is frightening and laborious. On good days navigating it’s tiring, however on unhealthy days present in it’s fully unbearable, and since our brains are working in a different way, we will’t instantly see that the best way out is remedy, or antidepressants, or our personal social networks. Sometimes the one manner out actually looks like loss of life by our personal fingers.

Max’s despair turns into personified by Vecna, a teen-murdering villain from the Upside Down who has made Max his subsequent goal. Vecna zeroes in on her within the season 4 episode titled “Dear Billy,” and her proximity with dying will get smaller and smaller. Max leaves notes for her household and pals to open after she’s gone and rebuffs their makes an attempt at assist, explaining that she’s exhausted of individuals telling her that every thing will likely be okay. Max additionally tearfully laments at Billy’s grave, wishing that she may’ve saved him from his loss of life and grieving the potential of the loving brother-sister relationship they may have shared. It is then that Vecna, posing as a bloodied Billy, seems to Max and explicates the amalgamation of her trauma:

You know I feel there’s part of you buried someplace deep that wished me to die that day. That was perhaps even relieved. Happy. That’s why you stood there isn’t it Max? It’s okay, you may admit it now. No extra lies. No extra hiding. That is why you are feeling such guilt, why you disguise from your folks, why you disguise from the world, and why late at evening you have got generally wished to observe me. Follow me into loss of life.

These are tell-tale indicators of somebody readying to die by suicide: Max has a plan, she’s disconnecting from her social circles, and he or she feels an eerie sense of calm whereas accepting that loss of life is the one resolution to her present predicament. But when confronted with sure demise, Max as an alternative escapes Vecna’s noose-shaped tentacles in a cathartic sequence set to a symphonic rendition of “Running Up That Hill”—her favourite track. She’s not able to die, and he or she chooses to avoid wasting herself when confronted with a life-threatening scenario after remembering her causes to reside are her pals, the folks that really love her. She runs via the storm clouds and falling wreckage of Vecna’s lair towards their mild, having overcome her darkest turmoil. She gained.

Except she didn’t, as a result of the storyline of Stranger Things is set to make Max endure. In the season finale, titled “The Piggyback,” Vecna’s plan to unleash hell on the remainder of the world is revealed. He wants 4 sacrifices to open a everlasting gate from Hawkins to the Upside Down, and since Max remains to be “marked” from her earlier run in with Vecna, she nominates herself because the bait and doubtlessly fourth and remaining kill. This initially reads like a strong and heroic transfer, an try to avoid wasting her pals (and the world) from a fiery doom riddled with monsters from one other dimension. But that is the place issues go very unsuitable.

While attempting to lure Vecna out of hiding, Max reveals that she really did need Billy to die as a result of she wasn’t positive he was a adequate individual to be saved, and that she needs “something terrible” to occur to her when she lies in mattress at evening. “I just want you to take me away, and I want you to make me disappear,” she pleads to Vecna. It’s not fully clear if that is merely Max revisiting her painful emotions towards her brother and herself as a ploy to tantalize Vecna into coming into his mind-traveling trance-like state, permitting Nancy (Natalia Dyer), Steve (Joe Keery), and Robin (Maya Hawke) to kill him, or if she is actually being trustworthy about her emotions on this second; notably, Max doesn’t deny that these might be her true emotions when Lucas (who’s showing to her as a Vecna-induced hallucination) asks if she’s telling the reality. People are allowed to have sophisticated feelings about sophisticated relationships, however Stranger Things satisfied us in “Dear Billy” that Max by no means wished her brother useless whereas displaying us that she had developed a will to reside so sturdy, that she would danger her life to avoid wasting her pals. This brief monologue has put Max proper again the place she was firstly of the season.

To argue that grief and despair aren’t cyclical can be irresponsible, however people who wrestle with psychological sickness already know this reality. Regressing Max’s story, the climax of which is hopeful and optimistic, into distress porn is a disservice. “Lucas, I can’t feel or see anything,” Max chokes whereas sobbing, having her legs and arms damaged by Vecna’s powers after he very almost succeeded in killing her a second time. “Lucas, I’m scared, I’m so scared. I don’t want to die. I’m not ready. I don’t want to go. I’m not ready.” She does, the truth is, die—writhing in ache and blind. Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) makes a feverish try and revive her telekinetically, however is simply partially profitable, and Max is distributed right into a coma, doomed to a hospital mattress indefinitely. “They say she might not [wake up],” Lucas explains to the group.

Suicide is a tragedy, and conquering trauma and despair is just not linear. Max’s story resonated with me so deeply as a result of the triumph of parting the clouds and strolling into the daylight is among the bravest battles anybody can battle because the enemy is themselves. But the ethical of Max’s journey on the finish of Stranger Things 4 is straightforward: irrespective of how arduous you battle, you’re certain to endure increasingly. This is a harmful precedent not solely to those that wrestle with psychological sickness, however to anybody that has skilled a life-changing cataclysm. While hope is just not a magic bullet, it’s position in overcoming despair can’t be ignored, and hope is a factor that Max Mayfield has been robbed of.

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