The Perks Of Being A Wallflower By Stephen Chbosky

I lost my best friend to depression, and I had no idea. I just thought he had bad days like me, so when he took his own life, for two years I didn’t know why. Teenagers like me aren’t taught about depression and suicide we are just told that we shouldn’t be sad and to sleep it off. Thankfully pop-culture is breaking down this taboo wall and teaching our teenagers about depression and how to spot and handle it. One example of this is in Stephen Chbosky’s book and movie adaptation, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, where he expresses a teenager’s struggle with depression through Charlie, the protagonist. Although the book focuses and explains Charlie’s mental workings, the movie portrays a realistic depiction of depression from an outsider view while also creating a greater sense of understanding.
The book that Stephen Chbosky wrote delves into depression at a first-person view and it describes Charlies life through letter form, but because it is his personal view you are limited to what depression looks like from the outside perspective. Charlie portrays depression in the book by how his social knowledge is limited; he also has persistent emotional shifts to an empty and hopeless mood; he has looming guilt and a loss of memory on the reasons of guilt. Chbosky wrote about what a regular teenager would face in their life and the sort of knowledge that they would have and this is elucidated by Alison Monaghan (2016) a PhD student at Ohio State University, “the protagonist/narrator accurately reflects the knowledge of someone his age under the circumstances in which he finds himself,” and, “the protagonist’s/narrator’s illness experiences allow the reader to draw parallels between her life and experiences and those represented in the narrative” (Monaghan, 2016, 39). This expresses a pivotal point on why the book is a major factor in pop-culture because teenagers should be