Celebrity Traitors star Joe Marler is a scene-stealer in the reality show, but getting to this point in his career and personal life has been a long and hard road.
The former England rugby union player – on The Wheel this weekend – has been open in the past about his battle with depression. In 2020, he released his autobiography entitled
In the memoir, he detailed his mental health struggles and has continued to speak out about male mental health in the years since. Doing this, he has had to confront some painful memories and past actions.
Celebrity Traitors star Joe Marler reached a low point
For Joe, who recently quit his podcast, everything came to a head in 2018. “It turned into more than just me feeling low, me feeling down, me struggling to get out of bed or me constantly crying on the way to work, stuff like that,” he told the i Paper.
“It would actually manifest in rage and anger and then taking it out on my wife. She was heavily pregnant at the time, and I would wreck the house. It was like, [bleep], I’m actually destroying all that’s good around me.”
At that point, the Celebrity Traitors contestant says he finally accepted that he needed help.
“I always thought it was the rugby, like a rugby burnout issue. But it turned out it wasn’t. There was more to it than that. I’m just very grateful for the help that’s been given to me since then and grateful to still be in a position to work on that.”
Joe and wife Daisy share four children together – Pixie, Maggie, Felix and Jasper.
He has since explored therapy
In 2021, Joe continued leading the conversation on male mental health in a documentary entitled Big Boys Don’t Cry.
In an interview with GQ discussing the documentary, he noted how his session with therapist Paula was actually the first time he had ever done therapy.
“That was my first time visiting a therapist. I’d been to see a psychiatrist before that. Humphrey, that’s his name […] He was brilliant for me.
“At the end of it, he said: ‘From what I’ve learned about you from our sessions together, I don’t feel that you’re a therapy-inclined patient.’ I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. But in his professional opinion, the medication route was very much a goer for me.”
However, upon meeting Paula, Joe admits that Humphrey was “wrong”.
“I hate to say it, but Humphrey was wrong on this occasion. I very much enjoyed talking to Paula and the route she goes down to help people with their problems.”
You can catch Joe on Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel on Saturday, 25 October at 8:20pm on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.
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