BIG BROTHER’S BIG MISTAKE
The latest series of the reality TV show has barely begun, but Channel 4 has already been criticised by psychologists for its mental health screening process after Glaswegian Shahbaz threatened suicide. Barry Didcock reports on the battle between ratings and responsibility
AS the presses rolled on last week’s copy of Heat, the self-styled “official Big Brother magazine”, staff were probably crowing at the headline they had come up with to introduce this year’s housemates. “Unleash the mentalists” it read. Even by Heat’s high standards, it was a beaut.
Accompanying it was a spread of pictures featuring, among others, Tourette’s syndrome sufferer Pete Bennett, “wacky Paki poof” Shahbaz Chauhdry from Glasgow, and bunny girl Nikki Grahame. “The most bonkers lot ever to grace the BB house,” said the magazine’s editorial.
But by the time Heat actually hit the newsstands on Tuesday the headline wasn’t looking so clever. “Shahbaz on suicide watch”, screamed the same day’s Sun on its front page, relaying the fact that the 37-year-old had threatened to kill himself. Hours later the Mental Health Foundation, which had been deluged with calls and e-mails over the weekend voicing concerns about Shahbaz’s mental state, issued an open letter to Channel 4’s director of programming Kevin Lygo asking him to outline exactly what psychological screening measures were in place to ensure the welfare of the Big Brother contestants. At the time of writing, the Mental Health Foundation had not received a reply, but Channel 4 is promising a prompt response.
By Wednesday, the rest of the red tops had caught up with the turbulent events playing themselves out in the Big Brother house. At 8pm on Tuesday, Shahbaz had left the house after a 90-minute consultation with a nebulous entity known only as “Big Brother’s producers”. He did not say goodbye to his fellow housemates – unsurprising as by that point they had handcuffed him, gagged him, locked him out of the house, stolen what few clothes he had and taken to leaving any room he walked into. And so he left, in pieces, which may have been the same state in which he arrived.
He did, however, appear on spin-off show Big Brother’s Little Brother on Wednesday night, after his departure from the Big Brother house had been shown. There he told presenter Dermot O’Leary: “I am disturbed … I don’t know if I’ll survive in the outside world.”
Television regulator Ofcom has received 184 complaints about Big Brother so far, 150 of them relating to that Wednesday night episode. It’s a large amount, but by no means the largest ever received. When 2005 Big Brother contestant Kinga simulated sex with a wine bottle, there were 259 complaints. And 517 people contacted Ofcom when, in the same series, Zimbabwean nurse Makosi was evicted, the imputation then being that there was a racist element to the crowd response and that the manner in which presenter Davina McCall conducted the traditional post-eviction interview amounted to racial discrimination. In neither case was Big Brother found to be in breach of Ofcom’s code.
Shahbaz is currently “holed up in a hotel room” – the words are those of a Channel 4 insider quoted in The Sun on Thursday – where he is, once more, on suicide watch under the scrutiny of “mental health experts” (another nebulous term). “He is not a well man,” continued the insider.
Meanwhile, Pete Bennet has become the bookies’ favourite to win Big Brother 2006, a rich irony given that it was his inclusion which Channel 4 expected to generate the most – excuse the pun – heat. Instead it is a different issue which has jumped up to bite Channel 4: a mental health issue, certainly, but not quite the one the station was expecting.
Exactly how much psychological screening goes on before contestants are allowed into the Big Brother house and how rigorous that screening is has been a controversial subject since the show’s inception. But it has never before come quite so sharply or tragically into focus.
Channel 4 won’t reveal the name of the consultant psychologist who advises on all aspects of housemate psychology. They will say, however, that the person is a chartered clinical psychologist with an MSc in psychotherapy and a BA in psychology, and that they are a member of the British Psychological Society.
In a statement, Channel 4 added: “The welfare of all our housemates is of the utmost importance to us and housemates are intensively screened by professionals to ensure they are psychologically strong enough to cope with their experiences. During their time in the house, housemates are monitored 24 hours a day and psychologists are on hand to talk about any concerns they have.”
One of those who tuned in last week to watch Big Brother was Daniel Sokol, a medical ethicist at Imperial College, London. Sokol didn’t like what he saw and isn’t convinced that Channel 4’s screening and assessment procedures are intense enough.
“ It seemed quite plain to me that these people were not psychologically robust – certainly not Shahbaz. Besides, how do the psychologists define ’psychologically robust’? I wanted the psychologists of the show to clarify the methods of assessment that they use. The whole Shahbaz debacle was, to me, just further evidence that the validity of their assessments is dubious.”
Nikki Grahame is another that Sokol has worries about. Indeed, a friend of Grahame’s has already gone public with her own concerns, describing the 24-year-old as an unstable anorexic who she fears might kill herself. Viewers had a taste of Grahame’s instability last Saturday night when a lack of bottled water sent her into an explosive temper tantrum in the diary room.
Shahbaz has since claimed that he duped the Big Brother producers by not telling them that he had been prescribed antidepressants in the past. “But,” says Sokol, “that raises the question of how thorough the [psychological] examination is. Is it just 10 minutes or do they have access to the contestants’ medical records? If they did have Shahbaz’s medical records, they would have known he was on anti depressants, that he was treated for psychological frailty.”
Sokol also wonders if the consent of the contestants itself is valid given that Rule 14 of the Big Brother Rule Book states that Big Brother can change any rule it wants. “Is it ethical to make these contestants, some of whom may be obsessed with fame, do practically anything?” says Sokol. “Does that constitute valid consent?”
THESE questions of assessment, consent and medical history are thorny ones and a potential minefield for makers of reality TV shows. One person who has seen the process close up is Dr Cynthia McVey, a psychology lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University.
“Nobody who is psychologically unstable or particularly vulnerable should be allowed to take part because they are subjected to quite a lot of stress and humiliation, by Big Brother not giving them their suitcases, or by other housemates,” she says.
McVey has been involved in an advisory capacity on several reality TV programmes, including Castaway, the year-long programme made by Lion TV for the BBC which followed the trials and tribulations of 36 people living on the Hebridean island of Taransay.
For that show and others McVey has developed psychological profiling tests which she believes are tight, accurate and – most importantly – hard to beat. If there is psychological frailty, she says she will uncover it.
She recalls an incident during the making of Castaway in which the programme makers wanted to include a person whom the tests had deemed unsuitable. “What we found was that this person was above average on depression and above average on anxiety.”
The BBC went back to the contestant and asked to speak to their GP. The GP then told the BBC that the contestant was, in McVey’s words, “psychologically vulnerable” and should on no account be allowed on to the programme. However, such laborious checks are expensive and time-consuming and it is all too easy to cut corners – or find accommodating psychologists.
Of course even those who survive the Big Brother house have another challenge facing them – how to deal with life after they leave. A fortnight ago, Makosi was interviewed on TV by Lorraine Kelly. She spent most of the interview in tears and told Kelly: “Since leaving the house I’ve felt so depressed. In fact, I think about killing myself every day … It all stems from the treatment I got when I left the house. The audience thought I had just been manipulative.” Kelly later described her as “a damaged soul”.
Cynthia McVey has her own story to tell. She met “Nasty Nick” – Nick Bateman, from the first Big Brother series – at a Royal Television Society event. “He did say that he had met other Big Brother contestants who had said that they were distressed afterwards, were depressed and – this is anecdotal obviously – were on antidepressants.”
Even Germaine Greer has felt Big Brother’s sting. She participated in Celebrity Big Brother in 2005, but walked out after five days. She later said programme makers used “superior bullying” tactics and called the house a “fascist prison”.
“You’re playing with peoples’ lives,” says McVey. “The contestants are only in the house for a few weeks, but the repercussions of that for the rest of their lives in terms of their self-perception and their self-esteem can be immense.”
And yet – and here is the deepest irony – we remain transfixed, tuning in every night in our millions to watch the trauma, collision, screeching and injury. Not for nothing do we call it car-crash television, but how will we cope when we have a human write-off to deal with?
28 May 2006
SundayHerald
