Torment of the troubled teens sectioned for their own safety: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV

Published: 01:54 BST, 23 February 2018 | Updated: 02:03 BST, 23 February 2018

e-mail

View
comments

Girls on the Edge

Rating:

Young Sheldon

Rating:

Television crime drama loves to romanticise mental illness. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Sherlock Holmes as a ‘high-functioning sociopath’, Anna Friel is in the grip of panic attacks and blackouts as Marcella.

The reality is less appealing, as countless families know to their sadness. Girls On The Edge (BBC2), a documentary portrait of three teenagers sectioned in a secure psychiatric hospital for their own safety, showed how wide the pain of mental illness is spread.

One sibling described the horror of watching her sister hallucinate about a demonic figure that was urging her to self-harm. Another girl’s father admitted frankly: ‘Her imagination for harm is just unbelievable. We can’t believe she’s still alive today.’

Girls on the Edge tells the story of Jade, pictured with her mum, and her self-harm

Jade was about to turn 18 but no one told her she was to be transferred to an adult psychiatric hospital

This one-off programme was respectful, and sensibly resisted dwelling too heavily on suicide attempts and scars. One glance at the arms of 17-year-old Jade was enough to tell how bad her self-harm has been, and how long she has suffered.

Director Holly Challinor was more interested in highlighting how the system set in place to protect the girls also damages them. Jade was about to turn 18, but nobody could tell her when or where she would be transferred to an adult hospital. Worrying that she would be sent hundreds of miles away, where her parents would struggle to visit, her anxiety levels soared.

It seems common sense that, when a patient is prone to obsess on her fears so badly that she puts her own health at risk, every effort should be made to give her life stability. We might not be able to cure her, at least not quickly, but surely the health system should not become a torment.

Another girl, Jess, had applied to be allowed home. In front of a panel of assessors, she was tongue-tied with nerves, so the experts helpfully put words in her mouth. Afterwards, her appeal rejected, Jess mused, ‘It’s easy to get in, hard to get out.’

The documentary became trite only at the end, when it laboured the notion that the steep rise in self-harm and hospital admissions could be due to online bullying and the impossible expections of social media. What ailed these girls went far deeper than the ordinary woes of teendom.

‘Growing up different’ was the theme of Young Sheldon (E4), a spin-off from the long-running nerds-and-heartbreak sitcom The Big Bang Theory. The one character on that show who isn’t constantly thinking about sex is physicist and former science prodigy Dr Sheldon Cooper, played by Jim Parsons.

Jess had to appear in front of a panel of assessors but was tongue-tied with nerves

Iain Armitage as the young Dr Sheldon Cooper and Raegan Revord as Missy in Young Sheldon

Parsons narrates this tale of his character’s schooldays in 1980s Texas, with a father who coaches the football team and a mother who praises the Lord for creating the world in seven days.

The Big Bang Theory’s writers have always taken care never to state categorically that Sheldon has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. But Sheldon’s literal-mindedness, his phobias, his compulsions and meltdowns, his excruciating tactlessness and even his mannered speech, are all typical of Asperger’s. The cleverness of Big Bang is that we laugh with him at the world’s folly.

Young Sheldon lacks that intelligence, and replaces it with schmaltz. It makes the double error of pitying his mother (‘What is wrong with that boy?’ snaps a neighbour at church) and then portraying his father as a beer-chugging saint who just wants to hold his son’s hand.

Meanwhile, Sheldon’s twin sister is smart, sassy and stocked with one-liners. It’s all as sentimental as country music, and a reminder that there’s nothing quite as insufferable as an American TV child.