Endurance Is Fading, Silence Is Inherited: Preliminary Findings on Women, Mental Health and Pakistani Television Drama Across Two Generations

Pakistani television serials reach millions of homes, and for many viewers they are among the few places where marriage, abuse and mental health are openly portrayed. This pilot study asks how popular serials construct women’s suffering and mental distress, what production contexts surround them, and how two generations of Pakistanis understand the norms these serials present. We examined a purposive sample of 15 serials broadcast between 2011 and 2026, surveyed 76 younger viewers aged 18 to 25, most of them urban students with ready access to social and international media, and conducted semi-structured interviews with seven Pakistanis aged 64 to 81 with little or no personal use of social media. Commercial dramas centred on a suffering wife tended to reward the woman who stays and punish the woman who leaves, and more often placed another woman at the visible centre of harm; at least 13 of the 15 serials were written or co-written by women. Contrary to our expectation, three of the five dramas centred on mental distress depict professional care. Among younger respondents, 91% affirmed a woman’s right to leave an abusive marriage, yet 25% agreed that a good wife tolerates mistreatment, and 89% of that group held both views at once. Older interviewees, by contrast, treated patience as a woman’s central virtue and leaving as a last resort, and most located help for emotional difficulty within the family rather than with a professional. Across both generations, however, the expectation that a woman’s troubles stay within the family proved the most durable norm: fewer than half of younger respondents (47%) rejected marital silence. We argue that endurance is weakening between generations while silence is being inherited.