On The Sopranos

I have been watching the Sopranos for a while now and currently on the last season. For the people who haven't watched it, I highly recommend and currently 2 episodes away from finishing the show. The showed aired from 1999 to 2007 and it is amazing how good it is and how ahead of its time it was. Tony Soprano is a legend. The episode I am talking about is Season 6, episode 19 which is focused on Anthony Jr Tony's son, and the struggles he is going through with his mental health. At this point in the show, we have watch Anthony grow up from being a young kid and now as a 20-year-old trying to figure out what he wants out of life and the direction he wants to go.

Anthony for the most part has never been the best student and most of the time tries to go to school and focus but ends up dropping out for one reason or the other. It is kind of the same in the Job field, and he has been struggling to keep a job or even find the right one for him. He has had jobs like Blockbuster for those who don't know what it is look it up, Pizza places, construction, and others. He somehow always finds a way to quit and is directionless which a lot of people in their 20s can familiarize themselves with. There is a history of mental health illness in the family especially on the side of his father Tony. Tony's grandfather dealt with depression, his father the same and Tony himself deals with panic attacks and bipolar. He can go from 0-100 quick and it impacts him a lot in the show in which he sometimes makes decisions in anger and on impulse which is not the best.

Tony sees a therapist and talks about his problems and is prescribed medications like Prozac. In the case of Anthony Jr, we get a first glimpse of his own panic attacks as a youth, but nothing is made too much of it, and he never really experiences any episodes until he goes through heartbreak as an adult. Anthony Jr falls in love with a single mother named Blanca who is about 10 years older than him and proposes to her. She breaks up with him out of nowhere and returns the ring which leads to his struggles with feeling depressed and thinking there is no point of living without her. Anthony falls into deep depression in which he stays in bed all day and questions the point of living. He sees a psychiatrist who prescribes him Lexapro in which improvements are made for a while.

All this changes when he tries to drown himself in the family pool in which he would have if his father Tony hadn't come home at the right time to save him. He is then checked into a psych ward to try to get him better. I'm extremely amazed at the attention to detail and just how important this show brought attention to problems that may not have been as talked about before and in a way in which it predicted where not just America, but the world was going to be. The Sopranos is a family story, a story of power and violence but the attention to details on issues that were arising is amazing. In one moment, Meadow Tony's oldest daughter, tells him and his wife Carmela to pay attention to Anthony Jr due to concerning suicidal statements he had been making which is like one a girl she went to school with who completed suicide by jumping out of a building made. This isn't just about the mental health aspect of things, but the Sopranos is an eye opener to the society we live in today. I highly recommend.