Emer McLysaght: Equating Love Island with suicide is not a useful mental health conversation

Every summer I sit down to watch Love Island and every summer I’m plagued with a nagging feeling that I’m part of a problem. There’s a cognitive dissonance that comes with watching and enjoying a show with such potential for damage, and then actively engaging in commentary that could add to that damage.

At its best, the reality TV series is comic, heart-warming and thrilling entertainment, but at its worst, that thrill takes a nosedive into toxic behaviour both inside and outside the villa walls. And Love Island, despite its name, will forever be associated with tragedy.

Three people linked to the show have taken their own lives: contestants Mike Thalassitis and Sophie Gradon in 2019 and host Caroline Flack in early 2020. These deaths have become somewhat weaponised in the murky and uncomfortable conversations surrounding Love Island, mental health and a duty of care towards both contestants and viewers.

Insults range from the mild(ish) — calling this year’s placid contestant Andrew “Blandrew” for instance — to the extreme

Love Island is broadcast six nights a week — on ITV2 and Virgin Media Two — for two months, and it seems ludicrous that people would give up almost every summer evening to be in front of the telly for 9pm, but that’s what has happened since the series was revived in 2015.

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The premise is simple: tanned and lithe young people travel to a secluded villa in Majorca to don a uniform of bikinis and trunks and rub up against each other in a bid to find “true love” via a series of tasks, tests and temptations. Public and villa votes decide who stays and who goes, and each member of the winning couple must make a choice to either split or steal the €50,000 prize.

For successful Love Islanders, the real money is made after they leave the villa to live an influencer lifestyle full of brand deals and character-led fame.

Social media can be the key to success when an islander leaves the show, but while they’re in the villa they’re at the mercy of the viewer at home, one eye on the telly and one eye on Twitter which comes alive every evening with the #LoveIsland hashtag. The tweets can be hilarious, supportive and insightful without being cruel, but when they’re cruel they can be devastating.

Insults range from the mild(ish) — calling this year’s placid contestant Andrew “Blandrew” for instance — to the extreme: threatening, misogynistic or deeply hateful comments, especially in the wake of controversy on the show.

The show is no stranger to controversy. Last year, when Faye Winter was shown delivering a tirade of abuse to her Love Island partner Teddy Soares, it resulted in almost 25,000 complaints to Ofcom, the highest number ever recorded for an incident on the show. The UK’s TV watchdog ultimately ruled that no guidelines were breached and said that, while emotionally-charged confrontations “can make for uncomfortable viewing”, the scenes were “within viewers’ likely expectations of this programme’s established format”.

As a viewer I can decide to switch off if I find the content too intense, potentially damaging or triggering. The islanders, meanwhile, are essentially cut off from the outside world and at the mercy of producers and editors, not to mention Twitter and the media.

After the deaths of Gradon and Thalassitis, the makers of Love Island were pressured to implement and improve duty-of-care protocols. Before 2022′s show began, ITV again stressed its commitment to this and said that each contestant would receive training around behaviour and language as well as “detailed conversations regarding the impact of participation on the show”, psychological support and proactive aftercare for when they eventually left the villa.

When Jacques O’Neill quit the show a couple of weeks ago amid floods of tears and admissions that he was struggling to cope with life inside the villa, those protocols moved front and centre. O’Neill had become public enemy number one after being accused of disrespectful behaviour towards several islanders.

Public discourse around his behaviour struggled to find a middle ground. What wasn’t helpful was equating O’Neill’s struggles with those that led to the deaths of Gradon, Thalassitis and Flack.

Suicide is a tragic, complex and still poorly understood phenomenon. It is usually the result of a range of issues and illnesses, and all three who died had histories of mental health issues. Their Love Island experiences can’t be discounted as factors, but to conflate O’Neill’s difficulties and departure from the show with these deaths is a dangerous over-simplification.

The conversation ignited around men’s mental health is to be welcomed, and the actions taken by Love Island producers to mitigate negative experiences and unpleasant outcomes of careless broadcasting have come a long way in the past seven years. It still begs the questions though: why do people go on Love Island? And why do I continue to watch it?

They go on for fame and fortune and perhaps a happily ever after, even at the expense of their emotional wellbeing. I watch because I know it is capable of empathy and humour and yes, even true love.