The Sports Guy’s intern passes on a link:
According to researchers, celebrities are four times as likely to commit suicide as noncelebrities and live, on average, thirteen years less than Joe and Jane Sixpack. Celebrities may receive substandard treatment at hospitals, victims of deferred medical tests or competition between surgeons for the honor of operating on a celebrity. Celebrities may experience more insomnia, migraines, and irritable-bowel syndrome. Celebrities are twice as likely to develop a serious alcohol problem….
Are the crazy drawn to Fame, or does Fame make them crazy? ASN claims the latter. To a celebrity, narcissism is a rational response to a world that functions as a mirror, amplifying one’s positive self-image, the sense that one is in the absolute center. It arrives later than classical narcissism—which sets in between the ages of 3 and 5, once a realistic view of the world begins to develop—but the disorders are indistinguishable, with patients exhibiting the same grandiose fantasies, excessive need for approval, lack of empathy, anger, and depression (how fabulous). Fearful of exposing the real them, narcissists project a glorified self that becomes so ingrained it becomes impossible to tell what’s real and what’s made up. This is the self they start talking about in the third person. Everyone must love this self or it risks dissolution. There must be Omnipresent Love. Speech becomes impressionistic and lacking in detail—a symptom celebrity profilers well recognize….
Celebrity, as John Updike wrote, is the mask that eats into the face. A study has shown that pop stars use personal pronouns in their songwriting three times more once they become famous; another study claims that the more famous one gets, the more one checks oneself in the mirror, and the more one’s self-concept becomes self-conscious. It’s a problem, to be both self-involved and self-conscious.
My personal suspicion is that it is the crazy who are drawn to fame. Even in the less-famous world of celebrity punditry, you have only to witness the delusional opinion-spinning of a Sean Hannity, an Al Franken or a Michelle Malkin to wonder if these people have it all together. The fascinating thing about Ann Coulter’s pundithood, what sets her apart, is that she gives off a powerful sense of not giving a damn where she is or with whom she is speaking, as opposed to the desperate If-I-am-not-on-Fox-I-do-not-exist brand marketing of so many other chattercrats.
While fame opens doors and makes many desirable things more accessible, it is a curse in its own right. I have known very few famous people that I considered to be sane who enjoyed the celebrity aspect of their fame for very long. And those I’ve known who consciously sought, and failed, to find success in those industries that lead to celebrity were, almost without fail, more than a little off their rocker.