By Sushi Das
CHANNEL Ten's Australian Idol is exploiting mentally ill young people, with judges ridiculing and humiliating them in the name of entertainment, according to a complaint by health professionals.
Psychiatrists raised the alarm after they saw a former patient ''laughed at and humiliated'' by judges in an audition for the show. Ten yesterday said the welfare of contestants was of paramount importance.
Australian Idol, whose judges use blunt and sometimes brutal comments in their assessments, broadcasts a selection of auditions in the weeks running up to the talent contest of 12 finalists.
Melanie Evans, a consultant psychiatrist with Orygen Youth Health, said that over the years she had seen several of her patients with serious illness, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, being bullied and degraded on the show.
''They are taking extremely vulnerable people who have mental health problems and just ridiculing them … rather than screening them out, it appears they are actually screening them in, in order to abuse them,'' she said.
Orygen Youth Health, Australia's biggest youth-focused mental health group, this week lodged a complaint with mental health charity SANE, through StigmaWatch, a program set up by the charity to monitor how the media treat mental illness. The complaint says criticisms from judges in reality programs that targeted young people ''are often tantamount to bullying''.
Dr Evans said mentally ill people did not behave or dress in an outlandish way just to be funny on the show. ''They are genuinely incapable of assessing their own ability and not aware … they're placing themselves at risk,'' she said.
''Some of these clients have been significantly bullied throughout their lives, so it's just a repetition of abuse that happens to them on these shows.''
SANE's executive director, Barbara Hocking, said criticism resulting in feelings of shame could worsen the health of a mentally ill person. Such feelings could act as a trigger for suicide, she said.
Responding to questions by The Age, Ten's network executive producer, Stephen Tate, said on-call psychological counselling was provided once at the competition stage. He welcomed contestants advising if they had an illness, saying the network would not like to discriminate against mentally ill people.
''It is for us to judge their talent, not how they have been brought up, any personal issues they are overcoming or to comment on their family life,'' he said.
Orygen's program manager, Dianne Alibiston, who submitted the complaint, said mentally ill people were entitled to audition but television producers needed to be more careful about those chosen for broadcast.
Australian Idol judge Kyle Sandilands was sacked earlier this year after he asked a 14-year-old girl about her sexual history on his radio show. She revealed she was a rape victim.
The television show's ratings have dropped this year, although it is still attracting its target audience of people aged between 16 and 39.