Some people do have very, very 'other' or unfortunate lives, but there probably aren't quite as many as you'd think, as the stories get recycled repeatedly.
As Sparklesocks said, they sensationalise them by twisting terms and happenings as much as they can. The headline might scream 'I was a teenage mum of twins!' and show a picture of a 13yo in a school uniform, but it turns out that she was actually 19 by the time she had the babies; or 'He kicked me until I was black and blue!' and, whilst it's still distressing, it will turn out to be a violent toddler son, when you were clearly meant to assume it was a husband/boyfriend.
Notice that even the most harrowing stories always end with an exclamation mark - and, as Dave Gorman pointed out, they always feature an attractive cover model all made up and with a big beaming smile in the middle of all of these tales of human misery!
I haven't read them for years now, but I did used to be hooked glance from time to time as a cultural reference point. (
) I liked the agony uncle (David something) in Take A Break, who always doled out usually quite obvious advice in the style of Sir Laurence Olivier!
However, the best bit always had to be the 'Readers' Brainwaves' tips pages. Rita from Somerset would be hailed a genius for sharing her amazing discovery that you could use a few sheets of toilet paper if you'd run out of tissues; or Chelsea from Renfrewshire would enlighten the world that you could 'save £££s' by washing out a used baked bean tin, filing down the sharp edges, finding some old Christmas giftwrap, cutting it to size, carefully gluing it around the side, adding more glue over the giftwrap, glitter and a bow to give you a beautiful and unique festive pen-holder to impress all of your friends - save you grabbing a nice one off the shelf from Poundland. They always seemed to have plenty of spare glue lying around the house....