Reel Life Consequences of Suicidality in Film
by Kate Brennan, Fulbright Chronicles, Volume 2, Number 4 (2024)
[…] through the media literacy exercise, Seggi provides youth with armor to protect themselves against a system that procedurally exploits them. The book is written as an act of service for all unfortified youth, reading like a voice that cuts through static to say, “I’m here, I’m listening.”
Review of Alessandra Seggi’s Youth and suicide in American cinema
by Mike Alvarez, Qualitative Research in Medicine and Healthcare, Volume 8, Number 2 (2024)
From the outset, Seggi underscores the book’s timeliness by highlighting the national and global prevalence of suicide – in-cluding its increasing trend among American youth – and the role of film in navigating dominant cultural narratives on suicide’s causes, contexts, and consequences. Traditionally, because of its mass appeal (read: low culture status), the teen film has largely been treated with disdain by the academic community. But as Seggi implores readers: “Films about suicide give us the oppor-tunity to consider what it must be like to feel suicidal, what events and conditions might trigger it, and what friends and family must go through in the wake of a suicide” (p. 7).