Joe Wicks has said he realised the scale of the UK’s mental health crisis when he was inundated with messages from fans during lockdown, saying he would sometimes spend seven hours a day responding to pleas for help.
The 36-year-old fitness coach, known as the Body Coach, will explore his parents’ mental health issues in a new documentary, looking at how his mother’s eating disorder and severe obsessive compulsive disorder and his father’s drug addiction affected him as a child.
Joe Wicks: Facing My Childhood, was produced by documentary-maker Louis Theroux, who previously revealed Wicks’s exercise programme was one of the things that helped him cope during lockdown.
Wicks told the Radio Times: “After [YouTube series] PE with Joe ended, I realised I hadn’t just helped people’s physical health, but their mental health, too. I wanted to keep that conversation going.
“As a young kid, I didn’t realise my parents had mental health issues. I just thought my dad was a drug addict and my mum loved cleaning. But I was aware I had this ability to share my story, and that…
