Stranger Things' trip through the mental illness Upside Down

We are in the Upside Down. A dying child, the missing Will, lies on a camp bed in his desperate fort, surrounded by an evil forest, stalked by a monster. He has suffered almost beyond endurance. He has little time. But his mother, Joyce, popularly believed to be crazy, has been right all along. He is still alive — though trapped in a dimension of experience inaccessible to most, and almost impossibly hazardous to all. Can he be rescued?

Back on this side of the television screen, as the credits came up, my companion looked at me and said, 'Scary.' I turned slowly away from the screen and shook my head. My voice wouldn't quite come. 'Life,' I said.

Now Season Two is upon us. Will it speak to me as intensely as Season One did? And if it doesn't, will that be a good sign?

We watched Season One towards the end of last year. I was in a bad space. I had been in a bad space for months. But I found Stranger Things riveting, and strangely therapeutic, an island of solace at the end of days which had become more and more difficult to get through. It seemed to me to be telling the truth, even saying something out loud which is almost universally unsaid, or worse, suppressed.

It was the character of Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) who most captivated me. When I looked at Joyce Byers (or at least, Winona Ryder playing Joyce Byers) I saw myself. She looked like I felt.

If you saw Stranger Things, that may make you laugh. Joyce is the role of Ryder's life, and she seems to give everything she's got to a character who looks more genuinely unhinged than anyone else I can remember seeing onscreen. Both she, and Joyce, seem so taken out of themselves that they are completely unaware of how they look to other people, even, seemingly, the audience. That was the thing that began to make the show important to me. I, too, have been so anxious that I forgot how I looked to other people.