A few weeks ago I was eating lunch with a few of my former students and one of them asked me if I had watched “13 Reasons Why” on Netflix. I had seen a description of the first episode (“As the school mourns the death of Hannah Baker, her friend Clay receives a box of tapes with messages she recorded before she committed suicide”) and I just wasn’t intrigued. The idea of watching a show with such a depressing premise didn’t seem worthy of my time. However, this student highly suggested it and I almost felt compelled to watch it between her urging and my knowing of students who have battled with depression. The show’s social commentary on underage drinking, sexual assault, bullying, suicide, and access to guns is particularly intriguing in the sense that it ties these themes together to show how teenagers struggle to cope with their surroundings. While it wasn’t a shock to me that Hannah committed suicide (since that was in the plot from the begin...