"Love Island" host steps down after assault charge

[Bob Jersey]

Caroline Flack, before she was to leave for South Africa for the next series of the itv hit, was arrested for attacking her partner at her home this past week.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/love-island-host-caroline-flack-steps-down-assault-charge-1263275 (link)

B

[PGage]

I don’t recall knowing anything about her or her show; had to search our archives to find this note posted by Bob a few months ago. But my Twitter feed has been full of posts relating this to social attitudes about mental illness, which got my attention. Does anyone here have more context on this young woman and her sad death, apparently suicide as per linked article? Did she have a publicized history of mental disorder? 

https://apnews.com/40defa2f6da82cdda85a56831c06f60c

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[Joe Hass]

I'll yield to our British correspondent for more info, but the sense I gathered is that the domestic incident caused her to draw more and more inward.

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[Brad Beam]

From: tvor...@googlegroups.com [mailto:tvor...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Joe Hass

>I'll yield to our British correspondent for more info, but the sense I gathered is that the domestic incident caused her to draw more and more inward.

 

Here’s a bit of a primer from Channel 4:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m1tdVN5pYA

 

_   _

|_>|_>  Brad Beam- Belle WV

|_>|_>  http://www.facebook.com/74bmw

 

[Adam Bowie]

It's unlikely that most of this group will know who she is unless they watch the UK original version of Love Island which I think is on Netflix Stateside, where I believe it does fairly well. And I should preface all of this by saying that I never watched Love Island, and I don't make a habit of reading the tabloid press - online or offline.

Caroline Flack was a TV presenter, who started out presenting kids shows before doing other things. She also did well in a series of Strictly Come Dancing (aka Dancing With the Stars) a few seasons ago. Love Island, you may know, is something of a hit for ITV2 getting the channel its biggest ratings.

Anyway, towards the end of last year, she was arrested for assaulting her boyfriend. It all caused quite a tabloid media frenzy, and with a first winter cycle of Love Island imminent, she stood down from presenting that series. The tabloid press of course milked the story for all it was worth, generating multiple front pages. For them, it was the perfect story. And so, with her case due in court soon, we ended up where we are. 

I'm absolutely not a mental health expert, but the UK charity, The Samaritans, have a really smart media guidelines code for dealing with celebrity suicides (https://www.samaritans.org/about-samaritans/media-guidelines/), noting you can rarely truly say what the cause of someone's death is. But social media has been alive this weekend with antipathy towards the tabloid press. The press has been swiftly taking down some of their more spiteful pieces. But in turn, they're directing venom towards users of social media for being so hateful.

Others have been talking about internet hatred in general. In general, you find nastiness from both the press and individuals.

Of course, tabloids only publish stories that sell papers - or more so these days - drive clicks. So there's certainly some schadenfreude going on here. People are clicking on those articles, perhaps even more so as of this weekend.

There's obviously an enormous amount of soul-searching going on, and enormous sympathy being shown to Flack's friends and family. Awareness of mental health and the impact of reality TV, tabloid press and social media on people's lives is becoming a major issue. Love Island itself has seen two suicides amongst former contestants, and last year the Jeremy Kyle Show (think a UK version of Jerry Springer) was cancelled following the suicide of a participant in that show. The issues surrounding that show at the time led to a lot of conversation about how much support participants in TV shows - especially reality shows - should get. Should it be months? Years? Clips live on, on platforms like YouTube, forever.

In the meantime, Love Island has skipped a couple of episodes (it's basically daily), although I understand ITV does want to bring it back - starting with a memorial episode. Meanwhile, Channel 4 had a series in the can fronted by Flack which they are now not going to broadcast. 

There's a lot of hand-wringing going on. 

Adam

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[PGage]

Thanks for this Adam (and to Brad for the link to the video summary), it does help me get a sense of what is going on.

What I am still unclear about is this: Was Ms Flack known to have mental health struggles prior to her death, and was this part of what she was being bullied about? Or are people saying after the fact that the media should have known or suspected she had such problems? 

Either way of course no excuse for just treating her badly, but the issue of toxic and gang social media culture, while important, seems separate from the issue of how mental health issues are treated. The two issues seem to be connected in this case and I am trying to understand why.

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[Adam Bowie]

I'm not aware that she had any specific mental health issues - at least none that were widely reported. But the implication that is being widely insinuated is that it was pressure from the press or social media that drove her to take the path she did. 

In general, I think the over-riding tone is that we are becoming increasingly nasty about one another, whether for commercial clicks or in the way we interact in social media. 

I think you have to look at this too in the light of the decisions made by Harry and Meghan to effectively step away from Royal Family duties. Not nearly as serious, but again a widespread (and I believe accurate) belief that whatever privileges come with being a member of the Royal household, the press has driven them to this. 

I thought this Tweet written by British comedian David Baddiel captures it all really well:

https://twitter.com/Baddiel/status/1228751397664980992

(Baddiel himself was the subject of a lot of social media hate for his views of the outgoing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his failure to deal with anti-semitic factions within his party.)

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[PGage]

I treat depressed and suicidal patients every day, and frequently have to decide whether to involuntarily hospitalize people. So I have a deep interest in these issues. I run a group for depressed young adults (18-25), and a frequent topic is the impact of social media in a number of ways. If you are 21 years old today you pretty much have only known a world defined by Twitter and Instagram and whatever else I don’t even know.  Also, even though they are not famous, it seems everyone is something of a celebrity within their social media world, and if a young adult with 500 Twitter followers reads 20 nasty tweets about themselves around midnight, they lie in bed feeling that “every one” in the world hates them. And sometimes, interacting with life stress and history of trauma or loss, they can get convinced that there is no point in going on.

But sometimes they also report that when people hear about their MH problems this itself becomes a focus of online attacks, which even further demoralizes them. I was just wondering if this tragic event was more a case of the first thing (toxic social media culture), which sounds like it was or the second (mental health stigmatization) which sounds like maybe it wasn’t.

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[Adam Bowie]

I can't begin to think about how tough it must be to be a young person in today's world of social media. While bullying has always happened, at least you could largely leave it behind at the school gates at the end of the day. Today it's 24/7 with jokes and memes being shared, to which you may or may not be privy. 

I think that this was indeed more a case of toxic social media culture - and also tabloid press culture - than anything else. The mental health angle seems to come from a view that if someone takes their own life, they must have had mental health issues. "What were the signs that we missed?"

You're certainly better placed than me to understand this, although I suspect that like everything, it's not as simple as that.

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[Adam Bowie]

Correction:

Reading a little more about Caroline Flack, I realise that I was wrong to say that she had not talked about her suffer mental health issues in public previously. In fact she had, been quite public about some of those issues.  

I don't think that this was necessarily a case of mental health stigmatisation. But it might well be a case of lack of responsibility towards a person who has been very honest about her own issues. 

[Tom Wolper]

On Mon, Feb 17, 2020 at 6:05 AM Adam Bowie <ad...@adambowie.co.uk> wrote:

I can't begin to think about how tough it must be to be a young person in today's world of social media. While bullying has always happened, at least you could largely leave it behind at the school gates at the end of the day. Today it's 24/7 with jokes and memes being shared, to which you may or may not be privy.

In a podcast episode I listened to about internet addiction, the guest pointed out that if anyone over 40 (or maybe 50 at this point) was told by authority that they were completely banned from all social media apps and websites, we would be able to shrug it off and go back to how we dealt with the world before social media existed. If a 15 year old were to be similarly banned, they would experience acute isolation because that is the way their peers communicate with each other and share things.