What to watch
Girls on the Edge BBC TWO, 9.00PM
Film-maker Holly Challinor’s intense observational documentary looks at the lives of three young women sectioned under the Mental Health Act for their own protection. All three are patients at Fitzroy House in Northampton, the biggest secure adolescent mental health facility in the UK, and the film gently explores the impact being detained indefinitely has on them, on their families, and on their hopes for the future.
Jade, aged 17, has been treated in Fitzroy for over a year and is worried about being transferred, when she turns 18, to a secure adult hospital. The spectre of the world outside the safe but imprisoning walls of Fitzroy hangs over many of the patients. For Jess, also 17, simply going out in the garden can trigger an episode, while 16-year-old Erin is coming out the other side, preparing anxiously for discharge and returning home.
The responses of parents are also understandably complex and tangled, so much guilt bound up in their fears for the safety and well-being of their daughters. But it is the resilience of the young women themselves that provides the welcome note of uplift in the end – a sense of real, tangible hope. Gerard O’donovan