What’s the best thing you could do for half a dozen troubled teenage girls who collectively share problems with parents, drink, drugs, school and the entire universe?

Would it be to stick them on the telly so that a nation can know them as the birds with broken wings, the ones that slipped through the cracks, the dysfunctional teenagers who are heading down the fast lane to trouble?

That’s what Teens in the Wild’s smug clinical psychologist David Coleman is doing with six such teenage girls who between them have enough issues to carry the Eastenders storyline for the next six months.

“Life today can be difficult for teenagers and their parents,” whispers our all-knowing psychologist, who nevertheless decides that the way to heal these broken birds is to whisk them off for a three week activity and therapy based programme in the wilds of Donegal.

First off in week one, we met the cast – and frankly you were grateful that this was only on the telly because you wouldn’t want to face most of them in person unless you were heavily armed.

Amy is 16 and lives with her mum Cathy and two sisters in Limerick, her dad committed suicide three years ago and she was fighting with him at the time, so she blames herself for what happened.

Because of her anger, she misses school, and she is physically and verbally abusive to her mother; she hits her sisters, classmates and anyone else who gets in her way. She has no patience and yet can reason out her thoughts and knows she needs help – perhaps not in the glare of the camera, mind you.

Niamh is 16, her parents are separated and she lives in Dublin with mum Ann and her brother; she is not in school ever since she told the teacher to f*** off; again she is verbally and physically abusive and her mother lives in fear of where Niamh will end up.

She has broken windows in the house, trashed cars, steals money from her mother, and calls her mother a f***ing bitch, and for good measure put a sledgehammer through the door where the gaping hole is still testimony to her prowess.

Lisa is 14 and lives in Dublin with parents Yvonne and Declan and five siblings; she often goes missing, has dropped out of school and her parents worry for her safety – so they stick her on camera and give out to her on national telly.

She was once the victim of a serious assault by eight other girls banging her head off the ground; given that she sleeps with a hurley and a golf club at the bottom of her bunk bed, it doesn’t look like she’d allow that to happen again.

For more, read this week's Connacht Sentinel