Awful unreality of fame creates disposable lives

Larry King is wondering if reality TV is "out of control". Fellow news anchor Campbell Brown has "shocking" evidence that it "actually harms people".

Even CNN's fluffy Showbiz Tonight is hosting earnest studio discussions about the "many, many" shows having a "detrimental effect on real life".

The very public meltdown which saw Britain's Got Talent runner-up Susan Boyle rushed to The Priory last weekend has kick started noisy soul-searching among some of the biggest names in American TV.

Several of America's best-known opinion-formers spent the week asking serious questions about the genre of television show that facilitated her all-too-giddy rise from unemployed, cat-loving spinster to global singing sensation.

In a country that has embraced Britain's reality TV formats almost as vigorously as it took Boyle to its heart - the Scottish singer was invited on Oprah and plastered across every major news network - her case symbolises the excess of an industry built on the exploitation of what critics call "disposable people".

Her admittance to London's famous rehab clinic comes months after Paula Goodspeed, a mentally fragile contestant who was cruelly rejected by Simon Cowell on American Idol, committed suicide in a car parked outside fellow judge Paula Abdul's LA home.

Hollywood website TheWrap.com this week published an investigation into what headline-writers are calling the "Truman Show syndrome" (after the Jim Carrey film about an exploited reality star). It revealed that at least 11 participants on real-life TV shows have recently committed suicide.

The report highlighted the shocking case of Cheryl Kosewicz, who took her life after appearing on the CBS show Pirate Masters in 2007. "This frickin' show!" she wrote in an email shortly before her death. "It's not getting good reviews... Then I made the National Enquirer... The hits keep on coming."

It further discussed Kellie McGee, who took an overdose in 2005 after being dropped from ABC's Extreme Makeover, in which frumpy women are given a "Cinderella-like transformation" at the hands of Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeons.

After being told that her facelift was being cancelled because it didn't fit the show's production schedule, McGee had cried: "How can I go home as ugly as I left?"

So widespread is the problem that some US psychiatrists now specialise in preventing former reality TV stars from taking their own life. Dr Jamie Huysman, who founded the AfterTVcare organisation, has treated more than 800 such patients, and says broadcasters are failing their duty of care.

"This is a far, far bigger problem than you realise," he said. "The deaths you know about are the tip of an iceberg. I can think of at least three other ones that have occurred a couple of weeks after TV shows, which went totally undocumented.

"Producers have to start being socially responsible. At the moment, they are taking vulnerable contestants and treating them as what I'd call disposable people. They don't seem to mind, because when someone goes home and dies, it happens off camera."

Boyle's case coincided with the start of another season of the US version of I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and the grandfather of reality shows, Big Brother. It also followed news that Nadya Suleman, the fragile woman known as "Octo-mum", is to force her eight newborns to grow up in front of a documentary camera.

The sheer quantity of reality shows in production is part of the problem. Entire channels are devoted to broadcasting them, and they have largely replaced the studio chatshow as the cheapest means for US broadcasters to garner mass audiences.

TV chatshows were forced to get their house in order in the mid-1990s, following the death of Scott Amedure, a gay man who was murdered after confessing that he was in love with a heterosexual friend, Jonathan Schmitz, during an episode of The Jenny Jones Show. Schmitz killed Amedure three days later.

Following that incident, it became standard practice to screen chatshow guests for psychiatric problems. But reality programming lags far behind. Most experts complain that producers make no provision for after-care.

"For the most part, the people they hire to conduct pre-screening are simply not robust enough," says Carole Lieberman, a media psychiatrist who appeared as an expert witness in the Jenny Jones case.

"They don't stand up to the producers because they're star-struck and they think if they tell the truth, then it'll be the last TV show they ever get booked on. So vulnerable people keep getting put in positions they shouldn't."

The often-unspoken suspicion is that TV producers quietly encourage reality contestants to have meltdowns because it boosts ratings. Some evidence certainly suggests as much.

A couple of years ago Melanie Bell, who starred in the show Vegas Elvis, jumped to her death from the Stratosphere hotel after a day of filming.

Producers responded to the crisis by putting out a press release, trumpeting the fact that Vegas Elvis was now "the second reality show in less than two months to suffer a cast member suicide".

- INDEPENDENT