Last year's Bachelor "villian" says the show tries to make the contestants "go a little bit nuts".

Twenty-five women will be living, breathing, and dreaming Richie Strahan when they take up residence in The Bachelor mansion — mostly because there’s nothing else to do.

Last year’s villain/most entertaining woman Emily Simms says she and her fellow competitors for Sam Wood’s heart were so isolated from reality and so focussed on all things Wood (ahem) that they became “institutionalised”.

“They make you basically live and breath him [Sam Wood], and obviously the other girls, so there is not too much to do. I guess they do it all to make us go a little bit nuts.

“There is nothing to think about, there is not much to do, so you sit around and talk about him and the other girls, the dates, it’s your world,” she told the Daily Telegraph. 

During her six weeks inside the love prison, Simms, like the other women, was allowed only a 10-minute monitored phone conversation with family once a fortnight. They had no access to TV, magazines, or social media.

"The way some of us girls described it when we came out was like we felt like we had been institutionalised. I didn’t leave the house for a week I think when I came home," she told the Tele.

Of course, that could have been because Simms was the designated "bitch" of the show, complete with an attitude, a nemesis, and a telling-off from the Bachelor himself, who called her "highly strung".

She left the show before Wood could gift her a rose, storming past him off-set before she could be kicked off before her nemesis Nina.

It was all very melodramatic, and Simms says the producers made it that way.

Some days, the women would be awoken for shooting at 5am, and continue filming until midnight. Alcohol was plentiful, and there was a lot of time for self-doubt to begin to do its job.

"I didn’t trust any of them," she told the Tele of the show's producers. "It was towards the end of my time in there that I started to realise that this is their job, and they don’t care. They care about ratings."

Bring on the next season!