Body

What is this all about?

Sick-lit is the rising sub-genre of realistic fiction that — at its worst — aims to glorify death, suicide, and depression; at its best — it encourages vanity and shallowness which is all too– strange.
In recent years, the sick-lit genre has gone into the mainstream. Thanks to John Green’s blockbuster book The Fault in Our Stars (and the blockbuster movie that followed) which made this genre a little prestigious. We now have serious conversations about the importance of responsible narratives around teen mortality, grief, mental illness, etc. We debate the merits of 13 Reasons Why with its harrowing depiction of suicide, and its questionable romanticization of the aftermath. We scrutinize stories of terminal teenage love, like the one at the center of Five Feet Apart. And the list goes on. Are these narratives helpful? Damaging? Exploitative? Depressive? Inspirational? Hopeful? All these great questions are worth a ton of thoughtful answers. But earlier on, in the 90s, people abhorred this genre. Back then, it was a straight-up tragedic obscenity.

Moving on...
This is, of course, is the central question that sick-lit begs: What is it that all of us, children and adults, get out of these harrowing tales? Are we using them to grapple with our own mortality? Is it a form of healthy catharsis? Or are we all just a bunch of sickos getting our kicks? Personally, I think it's mostly the latter, and no one wants to admit it.
Sick-lit pushes the most painful emotional buttons in our brains without actually forcing us to experience the much, much greater pain of living the reality. Horror movies and haunted houses do the same thing, letting us have a tiny taste of sheer terror though we know the whole time that we're safe. Pain, like pleasure, provides an endorphin rush, and humans have been using entertainment to chase that high for thousands of years.