50 pages • 1 hour read
Suzanne YoungThe Program
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Social Context: Mental Illness Stigma
Young addresses the stigma surrounding mental health, particularly depression. Depression is a mental illness that affects a person’s mood, thoughts, and behaviors. The symptoms of depression are often feelings of hopelessness and sadness and reduced social activity. Sometimes, depression leads to suicidal ideation or death by suicide. Although depression affects most of the global population, people with mental illnesses experience stigma. There is a difference between experiencing periods of depression and having a depressive disorder. Some forms of depression are temporary or circumstantial and cured through the correct treatment, whereas certain disorders can be permanent. In The Program, distinctions aren’t made between the types of illness, and any symptoms of potential disorders are treated as justification for forced memory removal. This treatment arises from prejudice, known in this context as ableism.
Stigma can affect public, systemic, and personal spheres and can lead to a greater expression of hopelessness from those affected because they do not have a support system. The Program addresses this stigma on a public scale as the medical professionals in the novel attempt to “cure” depression under the guise of public health. The characters in The Program view depression as a contagious disease that can spread quickly from one person to another. This view of mental illness as a disease is stigmatizing because it does not account for the neurological symptoms that cause depression. The belief that a person can “cure” mental illness as a disease erases the experiences of people with mental illness and implicatively blames them for not “curing” themselves. The belief that people who have mental illness are simply not taking the correct pills or are spreading their mental illness to other people is stigmatizing and ableist. However, because of the dystopian world that Sloane lives in, she does not have the tools to realize that the world around her does not understand mental illness and increases the stigma, even as they claim to care.
Genre Context: Young Adult Dystopian Fiction
The young adult dystopian fiction genre became popular in the early 2000s. Dystopian novels are set in an imagined society that oppresses citizens through injustice, violence, and enforced control. The novels follow similar plots in which a resistance movement from this dystopian society pushes back against the oppressive society. One of the first dystopian novels was George Orwell’s 1984, which was originally published in 1949. The young adult dystopian genre has taken elements from novels such as 1984 while continuing the narrative through the eyes of teenagers. Additionally, works from this genre of young adult literature often feature romance subplots. Novels such as The Hunger Games series and the Divergent series popularized this genre as they focus on teen protagonists set against a turbulent social or political force. These books often focus on specific elements of people or society that can be easily demonstrated and explored for a younger audience. The Hunger Games, for example, focuses largely on class disparities exacerbated by a wealthy ruling class. Meanwhile, Divergent addresses the separation of groups of people based on personality as a means of controlling them and stoking prejudice against one another. Both feature major romantic storylines for their characters to add a different form of tension to the plot.
Oftentimes, these novels highlight the dark side of political systems that oppose the characters living in freedom. Major themes in these novels include surveillance from the government, mind control, and a group of rebels counteracting the oppressive state. The Program derives from this genre, focusing on the unique underpinnings of emotional and mental wellness to push against the dystopian society that the characters exist within. The plot points in these novels reflect the growing anxieties of teenagers as they are on the verge of adulthood. The Program reveals a unique perspective on this narrative structure as the parents of the “sick” teenagers report them to The Program because of a fear that they will lose their child. This added layer of surveillance adds to the character’s feelings of isolation and abandonment within a chaotic world that they do not understand.
