Sex Education: Was Otis’ Therapy Journey In Season 3 The Most Honest Portrayal Of Mental Health On Teen TV? Here’s What We Think
Season 3 of Sex Education takes a bold, unfiltered approach to teen mental health through Otis Milburn’s messy, awkward, and deeply relatable unraveling.
Otis’s therapy spiral in Sex Education Season 3 might be the most raw and honest mental health arc ever shown on teen TV (Photo Credit – Instagram)
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Right from the first few episodes of Sex Education Season 3, Otis Milburn starts breaking away from the “therapist-in-a-bathroom-stall” label. And it’s in this shift, awkward, messy, and painfully real that the show starts telling one of the most honest stories about mental health seen on teen television.
Otis isn’t suddenly a savior or a self-aware guru. He’s spiraling, pretending he’s not. He ghosts therapy, ghosts feelings, ghosts communication. What he becomes is every teenager who thinks they’ve figured it out until they haven’t.
But here’s where it hits deeper. Unlike most shows that wrap teen angst in glossy montages and motivational one-liners, Sex Education doesn’t let Otis escape growth. It makes him sit in it. Season 3 tosses him into a new school principal’s system, a new fractured dynamic with Maeve, and the slow, creeping realization that talking about your feelings doesn’t mean you’ve processed them.
Sex Education: Does Otis’ Have The Most Honest Therapy Story On TV?
The game-changer was Jean Milburn, Otis’s own mother and therapist who goes through a complicated pregnancy while trying to stay emotionally available. This forces Otis to confront the uncomfortable: what if your therapist mom is just as emotionally scrambled as you? And what if healing is clumsy, not cool?
That’s what makes the journey so sharply written. When Otis finally opens up, it’s not through a textbook-perfect confession. It’s in broken sentences, charged silences, and overdue conversations. The therapy narrative in Sex Education doesn’t just focus on the listener. It focuses on the one who’s too used to listening and forgets they need to be heard too.
And while the show’s filled with quirky humor and s*xual chaos, this season tightens its grip on emotional authenticity. Otis’s unraveling isn’t tragic, it’s necessary. And it’s never glamorized.
Season 3 doesn’t give you a cure or a five-step guide. It gives you confusion, denial, delayed apologies, and those small, exhausting wins that actually feel earned. In a sea of dramatized therapy arcs, Sex Education kept it raw.
So yeah, Otis’s therapy journey might not be Instagram-ready but it’s the most honest one out there.
