Entertainment vs ethics: how psychologists protect reality TV contestants’ mental health I’m a Celebrity, Love Island, Big Brother: distress on reality television is not unusual. Where do TV’s psychologists draw the line?

It’s no longer unusual to turn on the TV and witness somebody in distress. If you followed ITV2’s Love Island this summer, you would have seen Danny Dyer’s daughter Dani Dyer red-faced and sobbing after producers showed her misleading footage of her boyfriend and his ex.

If you watched Channel 4’s new competition The Circle in October, you would have caught the confused (then agonised, then angry) facial expressions of Dan Mosaku, a contestant who realised the woman he’d been flirting with for three weeks was actually a man. And if you have turned on the TV this month, you may have seen autistic I’m a Celebrity contestant Anne Hegerty crying before being covered in fish guts.

Mental distress and despair are now routine parts of reality TV, but this doesn’t mean the genre is lawless. Since Britain’s Got Talent’s Susan Boyle publicly broke down in 2009, most TV production companies have a psychologists on set. But who are they, and how do they protect the mental health of stars before, during, and after filming? Are entertainment and ethics competing? Where do they draw the line?

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“Sometimes if I’m working on a reality show, I might be on the set till 2am or even 3am some nights, as everything depends on what’s happening on the show,” says Honey Langcaster-James, a psychologist and founder of On Set Welfare, a company that offers psychological assessments and medical examinations to productions. Langcaster-James began working on TV 14 years ago after becoming the resident psychologist on Big Brother.

“Part of my job is to make sure that when the participant meets me they imagine literally the worst case of every scenario”

“When I first started there wasn’t the same level of awareness about what people who go on reality shows typically face as part of the process, because it was still relatively new,” she says. She believes productions have got “better and better” at contestant welfare, a sentiment echoed by Emma Kenny, a psychologist who works on documentaries such as Channel 5’s Raped: My Story.

“Part of my job is to make sure that when the participant meets me they imagine literally the worst case of every scenario,” she says. “I’ve done my job if they come in thinking ‘This is going to be great’ and they walk out thinking ‘This could cause quite significant issues in my life and my future and I need to go and think about it’.” Although Kenny works on real-life stories, she avoids reality TV as she feels she would be “a bit more stringent” than producers would like.

No one on the production team mentioned the word “catfish” to The Circle’s Dan Mosaku before he was brutally catfished in front of hundreds of thousands of viewers. Catfishing – the act of posing online as someone you are not – was always presented to the audience as a key component of the competition, in which contestants communicated only through social media.

“No, it was never discussed, it was never mentioned,” Mosaku, age 28, says of catfishing. While he now considers many of the production team close friends, he says he was initially angry at them when he discovered “Kate” – the woman he formed a close personal bond with – was actually a 26-year-old man named Alex.

“I’ve never felt, at any stage of my life, so many emotions at the same time,” he says now. “I was hugely embarrassed, I was very, very shocked, then I was upset. There was a moment of realisation… I thought they brought me on this show to take part in an experiment, but really they brought me on the show to use me, take me for a dickhead really, make me look an idiot.”

Good job Alex didn’t go in there with a knock knock joke. ? #TheCircleFinal pic.twitter.com/H8s5n9MSp5 — The Circle (@C4TheCircle) October 8, 2018

Like every contestant on The Circle, Mosaku had access to an on-set psychologist – but unaware he was being catfished, he didn’t use them. In hindsight, the finalist has reassessed some interactions with the team.

“One of the producers would come in a lot to me and say ‘Oh you’re doing so well, you’re really coping’ and I was thinking ‘What are you talking about, what am I coping with?’,” he says, referring to the regular production staff (not the production psychologists). He also feels the producers tried to dissuade him from confronting Alex earlier in the show to make for a better finale.

“Despite how strong and sound of mind you are, nothing can quite prepare you for what happens”

Marcie Ferros, a psychologist who offers therapy services for TV programmes through her company PsyCoach, has worked on The Circle and frequently undertakes “fitness for inclusion assessments” with potential contestants. “I look at what is morally right and what is ethically right and what is right for every individual,” she says. Mosaku – who was headhunted – says his experiences are “a credit” to this casting process, as he believes it would’ve been “dangerous” if someone less level-headed than him was catfished.

“So much went into it. I had a phone call with a psych, then I had to go to my doctor and get signed off that I’m mentally fit enough to go on TV, then I sat down with their psych and talked through my entire life from the moment I was born,” he says. He praises these “thorough” efforts, but adds: “One thing I will say is despite how strong and sound of mind you are, nothing can quite prepare you for what happens.”

PsyCoach has worked with over 40 shows, but Ferros notes that over 90 per cent of them don’t acknowledge their psychologists in the credits. “I think the general public doesn’t realise just how much effort goes into on-set welfare provision because we only ever hear about the occasions when things go wrong,” says Langcaster-James. From casting calls to daily welfare meetings, to keeping up with contestants for weeks after the show is broadcast, it is clear the duty of care is better than it ever was.

“[In the past] I think there was a feeling the psych was a policing presence and therefore they were potentially going to be a problem,” Ferros says. “As more people within production come into contact with psychological therapists, they understand that actually the role is a positive.

“They want to make good TV programmes, I want to ensure that the good TV programmes that they make are not exploitative in any way, and therefore we work together.”