Not someone I would recommend. See newspaper article re Dr Khalique.
'They kept asking me if I trusted them. My head was going a million miles per hour. It was at that point – as I realised later – that I had lost my head.' In fact, Niall was being driven to a doctor in Palma, the Majorcan capital. But he says he wasn't given any treatment and was returned to the set.
With no ITV doctor on site, the production team contacted Harley Street doctor Sophia Khalique in London, who then worked for the show. It was at this point he was given Xanax for his anxiety.
Next, Niall's mother Maureen was phoned by Love Island's producers, who told her they had organised a plane ticket and that she must fly immediately to Majorca.
They explained that her son was acting in a peculiar manner but said they did not feel able to divulge any more.
She says they told her it had to remain a secret because they didn't want the public to know what was happening with her son, whose disappearance from the show was already making headlines.
From the home she still shares with Niall in Coventry, Maureen takes up the story: 'When I got to Niall, he was a totally different son to the boy I knew before he went on to Love Island two weeks before. It was heartbreaking.'
At this point, ITV contacted Niall's GP and he, too, was asked to fly to Majorca. When he said that was impossible, Maureen says the production team decided to put Niall on a flight back to the UK, hiring a private jet to do so.
Once back in Britain, he was taken to the £1,000-a-night Nightingale psychiatric hospital in Central London, where ITV paid for his care.
With millions of Love Island viewers desperate to know why Niall had disappeared from the show, later, ITV staff, along with his mum – who was being put up in a hotel near the hospital – helped him issue a statement on his Instagram account.
It said: 'For far too long, I have suffered in silence and not acknowledged a fact about my life, which going into the villa has led me to accept. When I was young, I was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, a fact that has never been shared outside of my family.'
The message included Niall's thanks to ITV for its help and support. Today, he says: 'I was told to talk about the aftercare ITV had given me. But there I was, sitting in a psychiatric hospital.'
He adds: 'Now, it all feels like such a cover-up.'
He spent two weeks in hospital at ITV's cost before going home. However, his mother then struggled to find him a local psychiatric doctor and says she was given little help by ITV to find one.
'Niall was so depressed,' she says. 'He'd sit in the garden just staring. I would be scared every time I went into his bedroom as I didn't know what I would find in there. He had a year of hell.'
Niall says he regressed and became 'childlike' – watching only Harry Potter movies and The Lord Of The Rings. In December that year, he felt strong enough to talk publicly about his experience and agreed to appear on ITV's Loose Women chat show.
He says he was fully aware that ITV bosses would prefer him to tell viewers that he had been given supportive and proper aftercare following his withdrawal from the Love Island villa.
Still deeply stressed by the whole experience, he and his mother requested a meeting with senior ITV staff, including Richard Cowles, Love Island boss and director of entertainment at ITV Studios. He also wanted a meeting with Dr Khalique.
'My mum asked them if they understood what they had done to me. I also asked why I hadn't been invited for the Christmas reunion special with all the other contestants. One of the producers replied, 'It's our show and we can invite who we want.' '
When Niall told Dr Khalique how stressed he had been at being made to do things in front of the cameras that he hadn't want to do, he claims she replied: 'It is a TV show. It's a TV show you had seen before and TV shows are made to entertain people, right, and they decide who you are going to be with.'
Upset by this meeting, Niall submitted an official request to ITV in the hope of finding out what the production team had said about him in private. ITV's reply to this 'data access report request' revealed that on the sixth day in the Love Island villa, they had become so concerned about Niall that Dr Khalique wrote to a psychologist called Marcie Ferros and three producers to say they should ensure he was evicted at the next opportunity – two days later. (So much, incidentally, for evictions being solely the choice of viewers.)
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Dr Khalique had written: 'Please send me anything you want me to look at if he does not settle in the next 24 hours he is probably better out a there will risk him becoming full blown manic [sic]… Hopefully this can be done at the next boy exit (Tuesday?)'
After Niall left the villa, there were widespread concerns that someone with autism should have been exposed to the ridicule and sexual rejection that is all part of Love Island.
Since December 2018, Niall says he's heard from ITV just twice – when 2017 contestant Mike Thalassitis took his life in March 2019, and after Caroline Flack's death. He felt it was another exercise in 'damage limitation'.
Niall's story will not be included in the raunchy clips from previous shows that will undoubtedly herald the beginning of this year's series of Love Island. But every contestant should heed his advice.
'The production team forget they are dealing with real people with real feelings,' he says.
'It shouldn't be treated as a human zoo just to boost viewing figures and to make money.'
Last night, an ITV spokesman said: 'We fully supported Niall during and after he left Love Island and in line with his and his family's wishes. Our medical suppliers are contracted to look after the health and wellbeing of our Islanders. They have no input into the editorial side of the show.
'All Islanders are free to make their own decisions regarding who they couple up with and the public vote or format decides who leaves the island, not producers.'