After Dr Alex George found fame on Love Island in 2018, strangers would stop him in the street and ask for pictures. He became a celebrity doctor, one of the first in what is now a relatively crowded field. Today, his social media followers number in the millions, he pops up on Lorraine and Good Morning Britain not infrequently, and posts about matters of public health – and his private life – on his popular YouTube channel. 

Yet something has changed quite starkly since last July, when his younger brother Llŷr took his own life at the age of 19. 

“People talk to me a lot less,” says George. 

Instead of approaching, often they only look at him now and keep their distance. He noticed it almost immediately after his bereavement, which came out of the blue. The day after Llŷr’s death, a friend took him for a walk on the beach in his native Carmarthenshire. “There was like a parting of the sea, it was crazy, it was like everyone just turned around and walked away and didn’t know what to say.”

George, who was appointed UK Youth Mental Health Ambassador in February, understands this impulse: the squeamishness that means we send cards when someone dies, attend the funeral – then say nothing more. But the 30-year-old A&E medic is a firm believer that talking is vitally important, no matter how difficult the subject. 

Llŷr, who was about to start medical school, spoke to no one before his suicide. “He must have sat there and thought ‘I can’t say anything.’ He took an option that was completely irreversible, rather than [saying] ‘guys, I’m struggling here’,” says his brother, who speaks about it with the candour he hopes to encourage in others. 

If evidence were needed that, despite the obvious progress that’s been made, a stigma persists around mental health problems, especially among men, then here was a tragic example from right within his own family. But Dr George had long been aware of the stigma himself. He hadn’t known his brother was suffering in silence, but he’d had struggles of his own. Bullied at school between the ages of 13 and 15 (“mostly name-calling, a bit of physical stuff”) he kept very quiet about it. “Bullying has a huge shame about it,” he says. “I only told my parents a couple of years ago…It hugely impacts you. I hated going to school, it was terrible.”

Then, while studying for his medical degree at the University of Exeter, Dr George experienced a period of poor mental health. Again, he felt unable to seek help. “The reason I didn’t access support was the stigma,” he says. “I thought if I go to the university and say I’m struggling, they might say ‘well, you can’t graduate as a doctor’. I was genuinely afraid they’d hold me back a year. So I just kept quiet.”

Not any more. Although he has previously described himself as a sensitive introvert, who only went on reality TV after producers saw his profile on a dating app and approached him, he’s now on a mission to normalise conversations around mental health and make it easier for young people to access support. 

Tonight, he fronts a new BBC Children in Need documentary, Dr Alex: Our Young Mental Health Crisis, which follows the journeys of young people across the UK who are living with mental health issues. This is why I’ve met him at his new HQ, a light and airy room in a shared workspace in Kennington, South London, not too far from his Clapham home. Sensitive introvert or not, he is sweet and charming, and talks at a phenomenal speed. He barely stops for breath when answering questions, displaying an energy I can only imagine is necessary for someone dealing with his unfeasible workload. Combining emergency department shifts at University Hospital Lewisham with his ambassador work, social media and, recently, shooting the documentary, he says there’s a trick to what he calls his ability to “power on and do stuff”: apparently it’s all about boundaries; about separating work and life, and “investing” in himself. 

“We need to stop celebrating busy,” he says, though he seems to thrive on being busy himself. “Being effective and productive, having boundaries around that, enjoying your time off and enjoying your family, that’s winning.” 

When he was appointed to the ambassador role, he received a bit of criticism. “But I found that fair,” he says. “I’m doing something new…and I’ve learned to develop a thick skin.”

Dr George is diplomatic. The criticism doesn’t seem that fair – it’s not as if he lacks first-hand experience of mental health issues, in both his personal and professional life. He’s suffered from anxiety for many years, and had been having therapy for it. “I probably had anxiety when I was 15, 16. I’m now 30 and I haven’t really dealt with it until now,” he says. “I [recently] decided to access medication because it’s a hard time. I’m still dealing with grief and also the pressure of this role. It’s not easy, I’ve taken on a lot and it gives me anxiety sometimes.” 

He’s also had plenty of experience of dealing with mental ill health in his job, although not everyone realises how often this lies behind what brings people to A&E.

“One in three of the people I see, if not more, are here because of mental illness,” he says. “Where do you think the self-harm goes to, the overdoses, the attempted suicides, the drug-induced psychosis, who do you think is assessing them? It’s me. We need to realise more as a society it is a big problem and we’ve put it under the carpet a long time and now it’s boiling over.”

In terms of its effect on mental health, the pandemic has laid a crisis over a crisis, he believes. This week we learned Covid itself killed six healthy children in England in the year since the first lockdown. Meanwhile there was a rise in other physical and mental health problems in the young. As many as 1.5 million children and young people may need new or additional mental health support as a result of the pandemic, according to a report published by the NHS Federation in August.

So were young people in effect sacrificed for the greater good?

“I think it’s possibly been the hardest on them,” says Dr George. “They’ve been off school, missed out on education, they see the same information as us…the daily death figures [and are] catastrophizing…That impact on children has been huge… We might not see the results of it for many years.”

So what do we do about it? As you might expect of someone who, in January, used his Instagram platform to urge Prime Minister Boris Johnson to meet him to discuss mental health support in schools, Dr George is full of answers. And it’s not all about providing more funding for child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), although he agrees CAMHS does need more money and its long waiting lists need to come down. 

But, Dr George argues, a big part of the solution lies in supporting young people in the community, in non-clinical settings such as early support hubs, or “youth access hubs”: voluntary government-funded centres where young people can go and talk to mental health-trained youth workers and find the right support. Rolling them out across the country would cost “probably between £200m and £250m,” says Dr George. 

Does he think the appetite exists among ministers for putting adequate money behind this? “I hope so,” he says. “It’s not just the charities’ responsibility. Government needs to [take responsibility] as well.”

Dr George’s tone is serious but upbeat. Schools are teaching about mental health in a way that never happened when he was a boy. Millennials are the first generation to truly get it. High profile people are speaking out, and politicians are learning this stuff matters. “It’s a start,” he says. “We’ve got a long way to go.”

Where does social media fit in? It’s good and bad, he says; we just need to teach young people how to use it safely. “The phone is a tool, you can chuck it in the bin if you want.”

And shows like Love Island, with its parade of perfect bodies?

“I knew you were going to ask!” he laughs, before turning serious again. “Many would argue it creates a conversation about something that already exists. Did Love Island cause the body image issue? No, body image has been an issue for decades… We need to show a really broad demographic and not just pick a subsection of society that’s believed to be attractive… But a lot of people say it opened a conversation that wasn’t there before.”

Before I leave, he shows me the tattoo he had done on his wrist two weeks earlier. It’s a wave, for Llŷr, whose name meant “God of the sea” in Welsh. “It was quite painful,” he says with a grin. “I was quite brave.” 

I don’t doubt him at all.

Dr Alex: Our Young Mental Health Crisis airs at 10.30pm on BBC One on November 14, and will then be available on iPlayer