“Ode to Joy,” the immensely popular online TV drama on the friendship and love lives of five urban women, has come under fire for its depiction of mentally disabled people.

Changsha Thanksgiving Trip Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association, a non-governmental organization that helps psychiatric patients reintegrate into society, posted an open letter on its Weibo microblog on Sunday in which it called on the show to stop stigmatizing people with mental disorders.

The offending scenes concern the backstory of Andi, one of the main characters in the show. Reunited with her long-lost father, she finds out he originally left the family because her mother had a severe mental disorder, just like her grandmother.

Andi’s father did not know her mother was pregnant at the time, and he tells her that if he had known, he would have asked for an abortion or strangled Andi when she was a baby, for fear of passing the mental disorder on to her.

The NGO’s open letter said the “Maybe I would have strangled you” line was especially painful. “It seems that it’s better to die if you have mental illness. We feel greatly hurt,” the letter said.

A screenshot from ‘Ode to Joy’ shows a character saying ‘[Maybe I would have] strangled you’ to his daughter, who asked him what he would have done had he found her as a baby, knowing that she might inherit her mother’s mental illness.

Daylight Entertainment, the production company behind “Ode to Joy,” declined to comment on the issue when contacted by Sixth Tone.

The show’s second season is set to begin shooting later this year. The 42 episodes of the show’s first season have so far been viewed more than 11 billion times.

The letter points out that many patients can have a regular life with the help of medication. But, it said, the fear of psychiatric disorders manifested in the drama may cause greater prejudice from viewers toward patients.

“Our hope is that psychiatric rehabilitants can live and work happily in society just like other people,” said the deputy director of the association, known in the mental health community by his pseudonym He Ma.

He used to have a mental disorder, too. In an interview with Sixth Tone, he said most of his family and friends don’t know about his situation. And the reason he keeps it from them is that he doesn’t want to be seen as different from others.

“If they knew, even if they wouldn’t discriminate against me, they would pity or look down on me,” said He. “But we are just ordinary people.”

According to statistics from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of Chinese with mental disorders is over 100 million, of which 1.6 million have “severe” disorders. A recent report by medical journal The Lancet showed there are 1.2 million adolescents with depression alone, and that its prevalence is on the rise.

A law on mental health passed in 2013 stipulates that no individuals or organizations can discriminate against, insult, or abuse people with mental disorders. It also bans discrimination in media reports and works of art and literature.

However, for He and others, problems persist. For example, He said many have faced discrimination when looking for jobs.

Zhao Xudong, professor of psychiatry and psychology at the Tongji University School of Medicine in Shanghai, told Sixth Tone that discrimination, coupled with a lack of medical resources, has prevented many from seeking help.

“Many people know that they should go to the hospital, but they dare not do so,” said Zhao.

Additional reporting by Li You.

(Header image: A girl with a mental disorder expresses refusal when nurses ask whether she would like her family to take her home from a mental hospital in Zhejiang province, Nov. 16, 2013. Yan Zhi/VCG)