Today, society persuades us to seek public attention, and it doesn’t matter how: a certain kind of fame is just a snog away. It can be achieved by eating creepy-crawlies in the jungle, living in a crowded TV house, or slagging off your boyfriend on a morning TV show. But however fame is achieved, a massive lie has been created about what it really means.
The received wisdom is that fame will bring all the money, attention, sex and love you ever wanted.
It will correct all wrongs and you’ll never want for anything, ever again.
The reality is - Fame is a dangerous drug.fame and celebrity can closely mirror substance abuse symptomatology — and over time, result in actual substance abuse, isolation, mistrust, dysfunctional adaptation to fame, and then, too often, untimely death. The examples are familiar: from Judy Garland to River Phoenix, and Michael Jackson, to Whitney Houston.
The research conducted shows that fame changes a person’s life forever, and is felt more as an impact or “overnight” experience, rather than a gradual transition.
Developmentally, the celebrity often goes through a process of: first loving, then hating fame; addiction; acceptance; and then adaptation (both positive and negative) to the fame experience. Becoming a celebrity alters the person’s being-in-the-world. Once fame hits, with its growing sense of isolation, mistrust, and lack of personal privacy, the person develops a kind of character-splitting between the “celebrity self” and the “authentic self,” as a survival technique in the hyperkinetic and heady atmosphere associated with celebrity life.
Some descriptions of fame include feeling like: “an animal in a cage; a toy in a shop window; a Barbie doll; a public façade; a clay figure; or, that guy on TV.”
Famous people describe a new relationship with the “space” around them, as a component of learning how to live in a celebrity world. “It’s like fame defines you to a certain degree: it puffs you up, or it shrinks you down,” one celebrity said.
Being famous is variously described as leaving the person feeling: “lonely; not secure; you have a bubble over you; family space is violated; a sense of being watched; living in a fishbowl; like a locked room; and, familiarity that breeds inappropriate closeness.”
Yet, while the celebrity experiences many negative side effects of fame, the allure of wealth, access, preferential treatment, public adoration, and as one celebrity put it, “membership in an exclusive club,” keeps the famous person stuck in the perpetual need to keep their fame machine churning.
New Existentialists blogger Donna Rockwell, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist specializing in celebrity mental health, and is associate faculty at the Michigan School of Professional Psychology.