Ever since the massive Dead Girls Don’t Lie controversy in 2017, we’ve been waiting for a big Netflix series starring teens with mental health issues serious and honest help Experienced.
Season 2 of the Netflix hit Ginny & Georgia has found a great way to deal with a difficult subject.
The following article contains specific accounts of self-harm and brings up the suicide of a series character. If these topics attack you emotionally, overwhelm you, or if you just don’t want to deal with them, don’t read any further. At the end of the text you will find contact addresses for offers of help.
Things went wrong with Dead Girls Don’t Lie and Ginny & Georgia Season 1
Netflix unsettled a whole generation of series fans with the successful teenage drama Dead Girls Don’t Lie in 2017. The book adaptation highlighted hopelessness in mental health problems. The team was hit with serious allegations, including the romanticization of suicide.
We dedicated an entire podcast episode to the biggest Netflix controversy as the series wrapped with Season 4:
At this point you will find external content that complements the article. You can show it and hide it again with one click.
The continued criticism of Dead Girls Lies eventually led to Netflix removing the main character’s explicit suicide scene deleted from the series. That didn’t make up for the negligence in the narrative around it, but at least the suicide is no longer used as a point in the story.
Netflix
Dead girls don’t lie
The Netflix series Ginny & Georgia fell into a similar trap in Season 1. The main character Ginny (Antonia Gentry) regularly injures herself and this is explicitly shown. However, Season 1 not only fails to elaborate on that. Ginny, and therefore the audience, will no way out of the self-harm shown.
Ginny’s self-destructive outlet for dealing with her helplessness and anger remains just a story gimmick in Season 1. In the worst case, it can even be perceived as a solution for Ginny to deal with being overwhelmed. Season 2 changes that in a bravura way.
Ginny & Georgia Season 2 is a win for Netflix and for the portrayal of self-harm in shows
Ginny’s mental state is the focus of Season 2. In Season 1 we see her burn her legs with a lighter. But only in Season 2 is Ginny shown a constructive way to free herself from this behavior pattern:
To do justice to the topic, the Ginny & Georgia team worked with the experts at Mental Health America, writes Variety. They did not explicitly show the burns again. Instead, they make it visible that they are communicating their apparently hopeless situation the first step to the way out is.
Netflix
Ginny & Georgia
Showrunner Debra J. Fisher has planned to address the issue of mental health over several seasons and also to show us the further development of Ginny:
Everyone fights a battle that others cannot see.
The Netflix series wants make the fight visible. In Season 2, she even manages to offer serious solutions to this.
If you feel affected, contact the telephone counseling immediately. You can get help from advisors on the free hotline 0800-1110-111 or 0800-1110-222, who in many cases have already been able to show ways out of seemingly hopeless situations.