EMILY ANDRE’S OK! COLUMN
I’ve been getting hooked on Love Island again this year. I have to say I’m a big fan of Curtis [Pritchard], he’s so sweet and I love that he’s always giving great advice to the others. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ended up with his own chat show!
The one thing that has stuck with me is Joe’s [Garratt] behaviour towards Lucie [Donlan, below right]. When I was watching that scene it did make me feel a bit uncomfortable as in controlling relationships it often starts off with small things and builds up. In the last few years the definition of domestic abuse has changed to include controlling and coercive behaviour – however, I think calling Joe abusive is blowing things out of proportion. We’ve only seen edited footage and Joe did tell Lucie the next day that what he said wasn’t right. It’s great that we’ve got awareness of controlling behaviour, and we
shouldn’t belittle the issue as it’s so important, but at the same time I think you have to be careful how you interpret small snapshots of conversation. There has also been a lot of talk around protecting the contestants’ mental health and this is a clear example that the way someone is perceived from the show could affect their mental health. It could be easy for him to slip into depression as he’s received such a backlash, so
I was glad to read that ITV has been looking after both him and Lucie. It just goes to show the criticism you open yourself up to with these shows.
Pete recently opened up about his own mental health and said: ‘I got to some very dark points where I remember praying to God, please get me through this day, just to get through one more day. That’s how bad it got.’ He also spoke about how I stuck by him even though he probably would have walked away if it were him.
All I could do at that time was just be supportive. We weren’t living together so I just tried to make sure I came down to see him as much as possible and I was always at the end of the phone. I encouraged him to go to therapy and I was always supportive of that. It was a hard time but it’s what you do when you care about someone and I know he would do the same for me. With mental health, it’s all about encouraging people to talk and get help. I am still interested in specialising in psychiatry. It’s under-resourced with a lot of stigma around it and that needs to change.