TV

On the Outside: The Harsh Reality of Life After ‘Love Island’

After the suicides of two former contestants, the U.K.’s most popular show—which comes to the U.S. on Tuesday—is grappling with how to take better care of its stars’ mental health

TV

On the Outside: The Harsh Reality of Life After ‘Love Island’

After the suicides of two former contestants, the U.K.’s most popular show—which comes to the U.S. on Tuesday—is grappling with how to take better care of its stars’ mental health

By Kate LloydJuly 8, 2019, 10:10 am UTC • 25 min

Four months after Alex Miller left the Love Island villa, he started to consider suicide. “I never thought I would get into that mind frame,” he says. “But I would be driving to work, contemplating ending things.”

After being approached by a magazine editor, the 29-year-old structural glazier from Essex appeared on the U.K. reality TV show—in which a group of young, attractive strangers are placed in a Spanish vacation home, filmed 24 hours a day, and tasked with finding love, lest they be kicked off “the Island” by those watching at home—for just a week in the summer of 2018. “At the time I didn’t really have anything to lose,” he says. “I didn’t look at it as though I was going to make loads of money or become famous. I just thought, ‘Why not see what it’s like?’ Maybe that was my mistake.” 

Brought in midseason, Miller was eliminated from the villa just six days after he arrived. The reserved 29-year-old made the mistake of coupling with the villa’s resident heartbreaker, Megan Barton-Hanson, who ditched him to recouple with her ex. Inside the villa, contestants thought he was shy and nerdy. Outside, viewers were surprised when Metro revealed he was once a $64-per-hour escort. But then he was quickly forgotten. The ones who come into the villa in the middle of the proceedings are always at a disadvantage on Love Island. 

Upon his exit, Miller did what most reality contestants do after leaving a show these days: He spent the summer getting paid for public appearances and to post sponsored content on his Instagram account. Then the work dried up and he had to return to construction. Back in his old job, Miller started obsessing over how things could have played out differently. “Maybe there was some resentment toward the show; almost jealousy to the other contestants,” he says. “You look at it and think, ‘If only I was in there for another couple of weeks.’ I thought I was too strong. But when you’re alone and you’ve got nothing but your own thoughts going on …”

The first season of the American version of Love Island lands on CBS on Tuesday. And it comes with baggage. The reality show, which still airs on ITV2 in the U.K., has been running in its current iteration since 2015. (Two initial seasons featuring celebrity cast members aired in 2005 and 2006.) Over the last five seasons, 149 contestants with the average age of 24 have spent up to two months living in the show’s Mallorca villa every summer, each of them looking for love and competing for a $64,000 cash prize. Like Big Brother, the show airs daily in real time and the contestants have no connection to the outside world, no way to find out what people think of them. Unlike Big Brother, everyone on the show is conventionally very hot. 

In the U.K., Love Island has become a cross-demographic phenomenon. Nearly 5 percent of the population watched the first episode of the current season, which premiered June 3. Tabloids obsess over the show and run stories like “Love Island bosses reveal strict masturbation guidelines in villa.” Vice has a podcast devoted to it, and even the Conservative Party once tried to lure in young voters by designing Love Island–themed merch. There’s an official Love Island shop where you can buy reusable water bottles like the ones the contestants drink out of ($19) and personalized suitcases like the ones they take into the villa ($70). Ministry of Sound releases an annual Love Island: Pool Party album to coincide with the show. You can shop the clothes the female contestants wear on the program via fast-fashion brand I Saw It First immediately after episodes air. There’s even a downloadable game.

But this year is a turning point for Love Island. Alex Miller’s story isn’t an anomaly. In 12 months, two former Islanders died by suicide. First, Sophie Gradon, a 32-year-old beauty queen who rose to fame on Season 2 in 2016. On the surface, she was living the charmed life of an influencer—her last Instagram post was sponsored content for an underwear brand—but in her private life, she was anxious, depressed, and struggling to cope with fame. She was found dead June 20, 2018. 15,000 fans have written tributes under that Instagram ad now. 

Mike Thalassitis, a 26-year-old former Margate FC soccer player, was a contestant on the third season. During his 12 days on the show, he developed a reputation, gaining the nickname “Muggy Mike” because he kept “mugging” girls off (a British slang term for playing someone for a fool). Again, on the surface, his career was soaring: He went on to appear on the reality show Celebs Go Dating and had been filming for MTV’s Ex on the Beach. But behind the scenes, he had moved in with his grandmother to be her primary caretaker. She died in March, and he killed himself days later. 

Neither Gradon’s nor Thalassitis’s death is directly connected to Love Island, but the incidents have led to a wave of former Islanders, including Miller, speaking out about how life after the show has negatively affected their mental health. “You’re in the paper or you’re out in public and everyone’s coming up to you asking you questions,” Paul Knops, a 32-year-old actor/model who appeared on Season 4, says about leaving the show. “You go through anxiety. It can be pretty stressful. And then you go back to your own home, and there’s no one really to talk to about what you’ve been through. It all comes down to dealing with stuff on your own, and not everyone’s great at that.”

“Love Island should see the warning signs a bit more,” says Malin Andersson, who appeared alongside Gradon in Season 2. “The biggest point is to look after the people that made the show. They just discarded us pretty quickly when we left the villa.”

Jonny Mitchell, a contestant who appeared on the same season as Thalassitis, even started a Change.org petition after his death, calling for a transformation in the way reality TV treats its stars. In it, he directly referenced the producers of Love Island: “They pretend to be your best friend, push you into situations on the show and then sell the public an image of your character.” He also demanded better aftercare for former contestants. The petition is pushing 90,000 signatures. 

The problems the Love Island deaths have brought to light are not unique to the show. The reality TV genre has a dark history of suicide, including The Bachelorette Season 5 contestant Julien Hug, who was found dead in the San Bernardino National Forest in 2010; The Bachelor’s Gia Allemand, who killed herself in 2013; and X Factor finalist Simone Battle, who killed herself in 2014. Reality TV has been at this crisis point for years—but the rapid succession of Gradon’s and Thalassitis’s deaths, and the fact that they were alumni of the U.K.’s most popular show, has made it impossible to ignore. Now, as Love Island crosses the pond to premiere in the United States, producers are scrambling to improve their mental health protocol, while the rest of the industry grapples with the larger question of how to bring conscientiousness and empathy to a medium so often defined by ruthless exploitation.

Good reality TV requires putting people in uncomfortable situations. The genre’s modern era was practically born out of this notion, when The Real World sought to “see what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real” in 1992. But “real” moments don’t come from simply hitting record on a camera—environments must be destabilized, competition must be initiated, stress must be elevated, group chemistry must be purposely altered. The strategy varies from genre to genre: Shows like The Real World garnered their drama by forcing disparate personalities together. Shows like The Bachelor and Love Island, meanwhile, have garnered theirs by employing sly manipulation and setting impossibly high expectations for their contestants—who have been hand-picked according to traits that may make them more susceptible to producers’ maneuvering.

The conditions on Love Island are certainly more stressful than the dreamy Mediterranean holiday it’s presented as—and at times seem crueler than most reality shows. Per the rules of Love Island, each season begins with an even number of men and women, who couple up in hetero relationships based on first impressions. From there, the couples work on their relationships for eight weeks, with an eye toward making it to the end and winning the prize. But more accurately and most disorientingly, Love Island hardly has rules: New contestants—who, by definition, must attempt to break up firmly established couples in order to remain on the show—are added to the villa without much explanation, recouplings can be mandated at a moment’s notice, and the show’s elimination process changes frequently without any semblance of uniformity. Sometimes, the public votes to eliminate their least favorite couples; other times, the Islanders themselves are given the responsibility; most devastating is some combination of the two. There is no weekly rose ceremony, no regularly scheduled voting process. Instead, the lack of a format appears to have a clear utility—the more fungible it is, the more easily it can be twisted to keep contestants on shaky ground. It’s no surprise that “we’re all going to get tested” has practically become a catchphrase in the most recent season.

Miller was one of the contestants brought in midseason to stir up the drama, and was personally subjected to Love Island’s brand of ever-changing rules, which he found both bracing and frustrating. “They sort of handed all the power to one person, and that was it,” he says. “It was a kick in the teeth.”

But even beyond the structure of the show, Love Island goes to great lengths to destabilize contestants on a daily basis. Every clock in the villa is wrong, meaning Islanders have no clue what time it is. Swimwear is mandatory—no covering up allowed. And contestants are chastised over a PA system if they speak too much about things that are unrelated to the show.  

Andersson found being in the villa difficult. “We were like performing monkeys for them. I remember crying a bit,” she says, adding that being on the show amplified disordered eating habits she’d struggled with in the past. “I was minimizing my food intake,” she says. “I look back at some of the clips from my series and I am tiny. It’s so sad. But having a camera in your face and knowing that the whole world is seeing your body is intense.” 

So often with reality TV, the lines between real life and dramatic television are dangerously blurred. “We are dealing with real people, real lives, and I think it’s really important that there is some regulation,” says psychologist Gladeana McMahon, who has worked on reality television for two decades, starting her career with U.K. Big Brother. In the early 2000s, she published the first set of suggested mental health guidelines for production companies after walking off a show she thought was putting contestants at risk. She says she loved working on Big Brother. “Everyone was very careful because it was a social experiment,” she says. “And then the second show I did —which will remain nameless—made me horrified. It was almost like if you said, ‘Don’t do it,’ they thought it was a good idea. I thought, ‘Wow, who’s protecting the people in it?’”

Ethical Guidelines for Reality TV covers prefilming psychiatric screenings, care during Big Brother, and a guide on how to prepare stars for the outside world. The guidelines are still used by many production teams today, including U.K. companies Objective Productions and Twenty Twenty. But since then, the difficulties producers and contestants face have progressed—particularly with the rise in what McMahon calls “entertainment” programs like Love Island, where it’s a popularity competition rather than a talent-based one. “The audience gets bored,” she says. “Producers have got to up the ante each season, and that worries me.”

It’s notable that audiences who have previously accepted the Love Island high jinks are starting to turn against the more intense moments of emotional turmoil. Last season British television regulatory body Ofcom received 4,000 complaints about the show, making it the third-most complained about show in the U.K. in 2018. (No. 1 was Celebrity Big Brother 2018, which aired an argument in which soap star Roxanne Pallett falsely accused housemate Ryan Thomas of punching her.)

Most of Love Island’s complaints in 2018 were about contestant welfare. More than 2,600 were received after Islander Dani Dyer was shown footage that revealed her onscreen boyfriend Jack Fincham had been joined by his ex in the second villa, implying that their relationship was at risk. (It wasn’t.) Only a month into this most recent season, Ofcom has already received more than 1,000 complaints about on-show bullying, manipulation, and sexually aggressive behavior. Compare that with 2017, when the show received just 135 complaints, and 2016, when it received as few as 40—and, in both cases, the complaints were mainly from viewers offended by smoking and sex on the show, rather than any concerns about the contestants’ mental health.

In a statement released after Thalassitis’s death, Love Island’s producers argued that the show has always had a thorough mental health system in place to look after contestants before, during, and after the show. (Asked for comment, a spokesperson for Love Island declined, explaining that any information on the show’s support systems is bound by medical confidentiality.) Its description is confirmed by some contestants. “In the series that I was in, you spoke to somebody before, and they make sure you’re fine,” Chris Hughes, who appeared on Season 3, said on the Victoria Derbyshire show on BBC Two. “And during your time in the show, you can also speak to somebody. And then afterward before we flew home to the U.K. we had an opportunity to speak to somebody.” This description of the process is reiterated by former Love Island psychologist Honey Langcaster-James, who says that while working on the show, she reviewed the stress points of its format and the likely implications of challenges, and also conducted assessments during evictions and entrances. She offered 24-hour access to off-camera psychological support if stars needed it or wanted it and made sure the Islanders underwent psychiatric testing during the audition process.

The support that both Langcaster-James and the Love Island producers describe is currently the industry standard—but some contestants believe that it’s not enough to protect stars who might be struggling after the show who might be afraid to tell anyone. Langcaster-James says that while she’s offered aftercare on every show she’s worked on, it’s barely ever requested by contestants. “They see the producers as the people that hold the key to more exposure or other jobs in the industry,” she says. “And they don’t necessarily feel comfortable telling them that they might be struggling with their mental health.” Josh Denzel, a 28-year-old content producer who appeared on Season 4, adds that it’s difficult for some contestants to ask for help: “It’s unlikely that if you’re suffering or feeling like you’re being victimized by the public, or your current situation after leaving the villa, that you’re going to reach out. [Aftercare] needs to be more proactive.” 

Season 4 contestant Adam Collard told The Ringer that contestants from his season got calls once every two months from a mental health professional after the show, but many others said that they were briefed before they exited the villa and then were left to fend for themselves. Some also say they didn’t get help when they asked for it. “I know Sophie reached out to Love Island quite a few times,” Andersson says. “She wasn’t getting anything back. She said, ‘The producers don’t give a shit about me.’ I believe that, at that time, they were fixated on ratings rather than looking after the people that made the show.”

“No one anticipated the show’s success,” Sophie Gradon said at a cyberbullying conference three months before her death. “In an instant, I was catapulted from everyday life into the limelight. We became public property overnight, and everyone had an opinion, both good and bad. I started to believe what these people were saying about me was true.” 

While Gradon and Andersson were in the villa filming Season 2 of Love Island, the show unexpectedly turned into a national sensation. Only 500,000 people watched Season 1, but by the time Andersson was voted out by the public on Day 24, the show had become a talking point. “I got my phone back when I left the villa, and it was overwhelming,” says Andersson. “I got trolling and loads of snake emojis because I had said something behind someone’s back. Of course, the producers show what they want to show.” 

Denzel says that, while he was lucky to leave the show in third place to a positive reaction, his experience could have been very different. Like most contestants, his friends were running his social media accounts during his time on the show. They were shocked at the reaction the accounts started getting when Denzel decided to couple up with a new girl, leaving his then-partner Georgia single. “The accounts were getting death threats and racist abuse,” Denzel says. “My friends had to stop posting.” He says his pals reached out to ITV at the time, telling the network that it had a duty to care for Josh. “I don’t know how those conversations went,” Denzel says. “But I think as long as ITV are making a good TV show, they don’t care. If I’d left then I’d have been in a very, very bad situation.”

Trolling hits reality stars hard, McMahon says: “We blur the boundaries of real people and drama. So, in the same way that you might have a go at a character in one of the soap operas, you end up having a go at someone in reality TV. It’s one of the most disturbing things about being a celebrity now. Viewers either want to idolize them or knock them down.” 

This can be particularly upsetting for contestants who feel like their personalities have been misconstrued, a situation that arises on many reality shows, not just Love Island. Because while these programs aren’t scripted, it’s no secret that producers do encourage stars to act in certain ways and then cut the footage to create juicy story lines. In 2018, Olivia Caridi—a contestant portrayed as a villain on Season 20 of The Bachelor—admitted to having suicidal thoughts after the show. “I was getting messages saying I should kill myself,” she said on her podcast, explaining that the traits the audience had disliked her for had been crafted by producers and that she had been convinced to do things that would later be presented as villainous. Love Island’s Barton-Hanson had a similar experience after leaving the villa last year. She said she’d been cast as the “pantomime villain” and experienced depression afterward. The same thing happened to Thalassitis, who was also trolled after Love Island portrayed him in a way that Andersson, who knew him personally, says was false. “Mike was a gentle, humble guy,” she says. “And Love Island portrayed him to be ‘Muggy Mike.’ But they are allowed to do that. They’re going to show the public what they bloody want.”

Though there are exceptions to every rule. In 2018, Adam Collard was one of the most hated TV villains in the U.K. Then a 22-year-old personal trainer, he was dropped into the Love Island villa to stir trouble after the first couples had paired up. He spent the following weeks racing between the girls in the villa until things reached a breaking point. His behavior during the breakdown of his relationship with castmate Rosie Williams was called out by the charity Women’s Aid as “emotional abuse.” He was shown smirking as she cried, he questioned her version of events, and he belittled her feelings by saying things like, “I just think it’s funny, the way you act.” Adam was voted out by the public five days later. 

He left the villa to a torrent of tweets and think pieces about what was shown on TV as gaslighting behavior. He says he had to have security with him at the airport when he landed back in the U.K. because a group of women had come to confront him there. “One said to me, ‘I need a photo for my niece but I think you’re a cunt,’” he says. “I thought, ‘Yeah, this is what it’s going to be like for the next year.’”

Collard believes that he was cast as the villain in the villa because producers knew he could cope with it. “They interviewed me, they knew my personality, and then they put me in the villa and said, ‘You’ve got 48 hours [to steal someone’s girl], otherwise you’re gone,’” he says. “I cottoned on to the idea that if I didn’t go and hurt someone’s feelings, I was going to be out.” He says a producer came to see him beforehand, telling him that he would get a lot of bad press initially but that if he could “cope with this mentally” it would do his career “a world of good.” 

From that point on, Collard admits to playing a game on the show, but adds that producers “amplified parts of people’s personalities” and cut scenes to make him look even more villainous. “Anyone in the house will tell you that the argument [with Rosie] lasted for over an hour—and it’s cut down to three minutes now,” Collard says. “If you cut any hour-long argument down to three minutes, you can make either party look bad.”

Williams, meanwhile, told Cosmopolitan U.K.: “I wouldn’t label Adam emotionally abusive. We had a rollercoaster together and he handled the situation in the complete wrong way. I don’t think I could ever trust Adam to be genuine.” 

Despite all this, Collard describes that summer as the best of his life. He admits that he doesn’t think any of the other boys in the villa would have been able to cope with the pressure he was under, but insists he’s thick-skinned enough. And while other contestants say they didn’t get enough support from ITV2, Collard is more than happy with how he was looked after. “They sat me down and forced me to watch the three episodes that were in the press,” he says. “They said, ‘We’re happy for you to explain the situation and say it was an hour long.’ They gave me a number if I needed help.” 

Barton-Hanson told The Sun that she experienced similar care. “When I came out of the villa, ITV sat down with me and went through everything that had happened to make sure I was prepared,” she says. “I don’t blame ITV for any of this—they’ve been amazing. They are in regular contact and whenever anything difficult happens they make an extra special effort to check in on you to see if you’re OK. I’ve got the number of the show’s psychologist in my phone and I know I can call her whenever I need to.”

Even if a star doesn’t leave the villa to negative press, fame itself can be destabilizing. “Why does the National Lottery have therapists available to people who win a lot of money?” McMahon asks, before providing an answer. “Because we know from psychological research that even positive change is stressful, especially if suddenly everything you do is in the public eye.” 

Love Island is so huge now that Islanders go into the villa unknown and leave full-blown celebrities. The cast of Season 4 has an average of 800,000 Instagram followers each. That’s four times more than the average Bachelor Season 23 contestant. Denzel says that he entered the villa with 27,000 Instagram followers and, when he checked his phone 51 days later, he had 650,000. “It’s as close to overnight fame as you can get,” he says. “People go viral for certain things, and that lasts however long that story is trending. But with Love Island, you can go on for four weeks, and 1 million people know who you are. It’s scary.” Denzel admits that the show gave him a platform to “make more money and reach new audiences” but that, when he left the villa, he felt like everyone wanted a piece of him in a destructive way. “Whether your friends know who you are dating is very different to a man on the street shouting, ‘You’re a prick,’ from a car window.” 

It’s something that his costar Paul Knops is struggling to cope with now that he’s out too. “I really can’t stress enough how big the anxiety is when you’re in public,” Knops says. “Because it’s not like you’re an actor where people know you for doing a role. When you’ve done reality TV, people assume that they know you. They go straight in on personal questions. Suddenly, when you’re in open spaces with lots of people, it becomes too much.” 

The spotlit life of former Love Islanders is sold to viewers as so alluring that more than 100,000 people applied to be on the show this year, even after Gradon’s death. While both Denzel and Knops say that they’re enjoying life after the show, they explain that you can’t anticipate the impact that fame will have on your mental health. “You know people are going to come up to you,” says Knops. “But you don’t know you’re going to feel that way until it happens.” 

Andersson adds that it’s even tougher when the hype dies down. Shortly after she came out of the villa, her mother fell ill. “I thought, ‘Fuck this, my mum is more important,’ and I stopped trying to compete for work,” she says. “Work died down after about a year, I felt shit, I had no money, and then my mum died. I thought, ‘What the fuck do I do?’” Two years later, her newborn daughter, Consy, died at 4 weeks old. Andersson says that no one from the show called to ask whether she was OK. “It’s not their fault that my mum passed away or my daughter passed away,” she says. “But they have a duty of care because I was on that show, and therefore I am grieving in the public eye and my news is spreading like wildfire.” At one point, after Consy’s death, an internet troll even made an Instagram account pretending to be the child.

“These guys don’t need support that are coming out of the villa right now,” Andersson says. “It’s the year before that need support, because they are going to be hitting the wall.”

Celebrity manager Dave Read, to whom Thalassitis was a client, says the first thing he gives new clients is a reality check about what life after TV will involve. “You’ve got to have the conversation saying you’re going to get trolled on social media,” he says. “You’re going to open newspapers and read things and see photographs that are unflattering. The ex-boyfriends and girlfriends are going to tell stories about you. One of the hardest parts of being anybody’s manager is handling expectations.” 

Read has looked after reality stars since 2002. He started out managing soap actors from shows like 34-year-old neighborhood drama EastEnders. “But, then, of course, this thing called reality TV popped up,” he says. “And I would stay at home with Chinese takeaway on my lap, and Davina McCall would pop up on my TV screen on Channel 4 saying: ‘Please do not swear, this is Big Brother.’” His company, Neon Management, took an interest in the new television genre. In 2002, he signed a Welsh 23-year-old called Helen Adams, who had just been voted out of Big Brother Season 2. He got her tickets for the London premiere of Planet of the Apes, hired her a limo, and sent her along. “She got out of the back door, and you’d have thought that I had taken the Beatles and One Direction out of the car at the same time,” he says. “Leicester Square erupted for this individual who had stepped foot out of the Big Brother house.” 

Since then, Read’s business has grown to become one of the biggest reality star management companies in the U.K. Most of his clients are on year-long contracts to reflect the ebbs and flows of the industry: In the past, Big Brother and The Only Way Is Essex were producing superstars, but now it’s Love Islanders in the limelight. Read’s company currently has signed Danielle Sellers from Season 3 and Adam Collard and Ellie Brown from Season 4. And two years ago, he signed Thalassitis when the star came out of the Love Island villa. The pair became close friends as well as colleagues. 

“I’ve lost family members,” Read says, “but when I took that phone call … I have never experienced shock like it. It was traumatic. I knew at Christmas he was on a bit of a downer. I thought by the time we got to March, he seemed to be back to himself. It was a big shock.”  

Read doesn’t believe that Love Island is to blame for Thalassitis’s death. “My honest opinion,” he says, “is that they could have had an aftercare team of about 100 people in an office, who could have called Mike every day twice a day for a year, and I don’t think he’d have told them. He didn’t tell his family, he didn’t tell his best friends, he didn’t tell me. He loved his time on reality TV. His problems were more personal. Everybody wants to point the finger.” 

By “everybody,” Read means former reality stars who he claims are cashing in on conversations that Mike’s death has raised about the industry and mental health. “They’re quite entitled to their opinion, of course,” Read says. “But I think a lot of these people are just doing it for clickbait. I think that’s a bit dangerous, to be honest.” 

That said, since Thalassitis’s death, Read has introduced a mental health care program for the people who work for him and the clients they represent, where he’ll guide anyone who needs confidential help toward professionals. He’s most worried, though, about a wave of new managers who use Instagram to take advantage of reality show contestants. “They set themselves up on social media and say, ‘Hello, I’m an agent.’ It’s dangerous—young people are getting an opportunity and [might] end up somebody’s guinea pig.” 

The suggestion that reality stars might need help to navigate life after the show has been a long time coming, perhaps because their lives are often presented as aspirational. “We all want to create a persona afterward that’s of nothing but success,” Knops says. “But anyone who does these shows in the public eye goes through ups and downs.” The honest truth is, Knops admits, that many contestants do need support. And while some former Islanders’ problems are linked to the show’s format or unexpected success, lack of aftershow guidance is an industry-wide problem that contestants from Big Brother, Shipwrecked, The Apprentice, and more have spoken out about. It’s one that both managers and producers are forced to address quickly, as reality fame becomes both intensified by social media and less profitable because of a saturated market. Read says that, in his experience, only 5 percent of reality stars go on to be legitimately successful. 

“You can just be in limbo,” says Knops. “That’s where a lot of people fail. The idea that everyone’s going to come to you and you’re going to have a very successful career is unrealistic because there’s so many reality shows now. There were 38 people on our season, who come out and want this career in TV. There’s no way that’s going to happen.”

The care this year’s Love Island U.K. stars will get when they come out of the villa has heightened since 2018. The show has published a new set of guidelines that focus on making sure contestants have realistic expectations of life after the villa and that they are supported in handling their newfound fame. The biggest changes include the provision of a minimum of eight therapy sessions for each Islander when they return home, as well as “proactive contact” with them for up to 14 months after the show has ended. 

Callum Macleod, a 28-year-old from South Wales, was the first person voted out of Love Island 2019—and therefore the first person to experience the impact of the new guidelines. The former aircraft engineer says that his experience has so far been a positive one. The show now provides a video for contestants to watch as they leave the villa, starring former contestants—including Andersson and Season 4 castmembers Samira Mighty and Alex George––that addresses what could go right and wrong upon the person’s return to the U.K. “They say things like, regardless of how liked you are, you’re going to get people who will troll you, and just to ignore it,” MacLeod says. “Then when you get back to the U.K. you see a social media expert who goes through a PowerPoint and handouts, explaining the dos and don’ts of posting online. You also see a financial adviser.” 

Hopefully, this approach will allow producers to better prepare stars for life after Love Island and pinpoint issues immediately if they start to struggle, rather than hoping contestants themselves reach out for help. If successful, it could draw out a new path for reality contestant care across the industry. And the show’s guideline changes aren’t the only edit that U.K. reality TV is undergoing: A government inquiry this summer will look into whether the way producers care for contestants during and after filming needs to be regulated. Plus, British broadcasting union BECTU unanimously passed an emergency motion in May expressing concern for the level of support on-site staff were getting as they navigated “dealing with vulnerable participants.” The motion might lead to employers accepting greater responsibility for the mental well-being of participants and staff. 

Until then, it seems that responsibility for contestants’ well-being lies partly with the viewing public. Because, despite two former Love Island contestants’ dying by suicide and despite audiences reacting more sensitively to contestants’ stresses on the show, the U.K.’s still watching it. As the mental health issues of Love Island continue to grow in public awareness, it remains to be seen whether audiences will teach themselves to remember that as these people leave the Island and return home, they do so not as TV show characters, but as human beings.

As Love Island arrives in the U.S.—this American version is also produced by ITV—it’s worth acknowledging that this issue isn’t distinct to the U.K., or to this one show. Reality TV is still a relatively young form of entertainment, and its effects on those who, often unwittingly, sign up as participants is still coming into focus—for those who make the shows, for those who star in them, and for those who watch them. Some parts of the genre might always be exploitative, but production companies are starting to recognize these problems and deal with them. 

Thankfully for former Islander Alex Miller, his “soap” story arc didn’t end in tragedy. An Instagram post he wrote about feeling mentally ill was seen by a Love Island producer, who put him in touch with the show’s psychologist. “We put my life structure back together—what I wanted to achieve with work and my personal life,” Alex says. “I want to maintain my health and, hopefully, at some stage find someone and settle down. I’ve done my time on reality shows.”

Kate Lloyd is an award-winning journalist from London who writes about both pop culture and real life—often at the same time.

Kate Lloyd