Little Mix's JADE estimates most X Factor contestants left with mental health issues

British reality singing competition The X Factor gave us One Direction, Cher Lloyd, Leona Lewis, and Little Mix, among others, but it also gave most of its contestants “some sort of mental health issue,” according to former contestant JADE. “I’d say five percent of the people that went on there have come out of it not unscathed, but having survived; the other 95 percent have suffered in silence,” she says in a new interview with The Independent. “How do you go from being on that show to back to your nine-to-five? How do you get signed to the label, think you’ve made it, and then once your song doesn’t hit the Top 10, you’re just dropped? It’s so savage, this machine that we’re a part of. Even back then, we knew how lucky we were every day that we were still signed.”

Jade Thirlwall auditioned for the talent show three times before getting put into Little Mix, which would go on to become one of the most successful girl groups ever. She acknowledges that the show was “the best training ever for me to enter the music industry,” adding that it did change her life. “I was from a very normal working-class family up north, I had tried sending demos in to labels, I’d gigged all over, I was doing everything I could to make it, and I needed a show like that to give me a chance,” she explains.

However, there were a lot of “pretty fucked up” elements of the show. For instance, sleeping in a dorm-style room with all of the other female contestants: “Even at 18, I knew there were people who weren’t mentally well in there, keeping everyone up at night,” Jade recalls. “I don’t know if there was even security outside the house. It’s scary to think about now, but I was too young to realise that at the time.”

Ultimately she feels the show “had” to end when it did (in the U.K., in 2015; the U.S. version only ran three seasons, ending in 2013) and that a show like it couldn’t exist anymore because society has evolved to a different place. “We wouldn’t put someone that’s mentally unwell on a TV screen and laugh at them while they sing terribly,” Jade says. “The concept of a joke act on a show is just cruel. It’s all very Roman empire.” Anyway, American Idol premieres March 9 on ABC.