**The Complicated Relationship between Fame and Mental Health: Celebrities in the Hot Spotlight**
People have started talking about mental health more openly during the last decade. However, for celebrities, it is a rather complicated matter. What lies at the core of their struggle is the overwhelming pressure, continuous scrutiny, and an uninterruptible public gaze that serves to exacerbate the truly profound problems of mental health or even bring forth new ones. The article, it becomes underlined, the complications of fame and how mental health, shapes the life stories of celebrities who have shared their experiences and looks at how the stories add up to the larger discourse on mental health.
The Pressure of the Public Eye
Yet, these privileges come at a cost: the pressure of living up to the expectation of perfection. People are simply expecting too much from many of the celebrities and setting far too impossible standards for the very same people. This can create a lot of mental health problems, from anxiety to depression or substance abuse. It is quite often that media watchers and the public eye push stars to live this highly perfect image that becomes difficult.
Perhaps among the most profound of cases is that of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, who, after her marriage to the Prince of Wales in 1981, probably turned into the most photographed and hounded woman in the world. Diana, in reality, suffered from bouts of depression, anxiety, and bulimia—but together maintained a front of grace and poise. Speaking to the BBC in 1995, she told how she "was crying out for help but giving the wrong signals, and people were using my bulimia as a coat on a hanger: they decided that was the problem—Diana was unstable." Diana's candid discussion of her mental health issues helped reduce stigma and turned the world's attention to the pressures that go hand in hand with fame.
Similarly, pop icon Britney Spears has the most publicized battle with her health. In 2007, Spears went into an extremely public breakdown that led her to be placed under a 13-year conservatorship. Since, she has continued to remain in the news headlines while the tabloids make money off of her struggle. The #FreeBritney movement, which gained prominence in the late 2010s, stands in a fight against the exploitative nature of Spears' conservatorship and how badly it treats mental health and people in the public eye. Indeed, while the release from the conservatorship in 2021 would have proved a giant step for Spears toward personal autonomy, her story comes to caution on how fame can often boomerang into worse mental health issues.
Social Media: a Double-Edged Sword
Consequently, in the modern era, social media seems to become one complete double-edged sword for celebrities: one edge creates a window full of followers who seem more intimate with their lives, and the other side tears them down, if need be, ruthlessly. All this is at the expense of never-ending takedowns, trolling, and harassment that might fatally afflict their mind.
One of the very few celebrities to fall into this latter category is singer and actress Selena Gomez. With a following of over 400 million on her Instagram account, one can only term the engagement fairly huge. She's been honest and so open about her battle with anxiety and depression. She told The New York Times in 2019 that at times she had gone off social media—for her sanity. "I kinda freaked out the day I became the most followed person on Instagram," she said one day. "It had become so consuming to me. It's what I woke up to and went to sleep to. I was an addict, and it felt like it showed me things that I wouldn't like to see. Like, it's putting things in my head that I don't want to care about." Thus, this stepping back from social media Gomez reflects a wider realization that as powerful as online platforms may be, they usually contribute to poor mental health.
At the same time, Daisy Ridley, the *Star Wars* actress, became one of the many celebrities who deleted their Instagram account after being cyberbullied. Ridley got more than she could chew in terms of the negative comments that she was receiving, particularly after she shot to overnight fame with her role as Rey in the sequel trilogy of the *Star Wars* series. Speaking to *Glamour* in 2017 about getting over it, she said, "I was like, 'I need to get off it,' and then I did. I don't have social media. I think now, people are speaking up more and more, about things that they've gone through with their mental health, and it's so important to have that online. But it has to be positively." Ridley's case points to the darker side of social media: the pressure of keeping a social existence may at times clash with the care of one's mental well-being.
The Toll of Success: When Success Comes at a Cost
For many celebrities, the price of success can wreak havoc on their mental health. Pressure at work, with the pressure to always deliver, pushes celebrities into burnout, anxiety, and depression. The fear of obsoleting or failure to meet the expectations of the fans and the industry at large exists.
Robin Williams could make millions of people smile with his humor, but throughout his life, he was plagued by depression. Very creative, he felt stuck in jail by the paralyzing loneliness and isolation he experienced at the top of his career. Many of the forced voices to open up on mental health talked about the shock accompanying the suicide of Robin Williams in 2014. In an interview with *The Guardian* in 2010, Williams stated, "I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy. Because they know what it feels like to feel worthless, and they don't want anybody else to feel like that." The story about Williams tragically ending his life shows us all that no matter how well-known or successful and cheerful he may have been, anybody could have problems with his mental health.
Similarly, Heath Ledger was reported to be anxious and an insomniac at times; he would later become the posthumous Oscar awardee for his acting as the Joker in *The Dark Knight* (2008). The 'subsidiary' factors, in this actor's case, include being overly meticulous with his craft and the stress that usually accompanies fame; they were piled onto his mental health detrimentally. He said in 2007 to *The New York Times*, he admitted that he slept very little while he submerged himself in the Joker role, "Last week, I probably averaged two hours of sleep a night. I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going." An accidental overdose claimed Ledger's life in 2008, explaining what burdens the awareness and intervention on mental health are to the industry.
Advocacy and Openness
Most celebrities have had such challenges in life and always use the platforms to decry mental health conditions and the stigma that has been developed toward the affected. Sharing experiences has shed so much light on the barriers creating blocks to getting help.
For instance, Lady GaGa has not shied away from the fact that she has been struggling with cases of PTSD, depression, and anxiety. As she wrote in an open letter to her Born This Way Foundation in 2016, "It is an effort each day for me, even during this album cycle, to regulate and maintain my nervous system so that I may function normally. It doesn't mean it's not there; it's there to remind me that I am strong and I can conquer anything." Gaga has become quite vocal about her mental health struggles specifically to create awareness and to get others to seek help.
The man himself, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, reigning king of Hollywood actors, suffers from depression too. In fact, in a 2018 interview with *Express*, Johnson went on record to say, "I reached a point where I didn't want to do a thing or go anywhere. I was crying constantly." Johnson's openness over his struggles has made it ever more real to many, reaching out, especially to fellow men who might feel the burden to live up to social expectations of illness and unflappability.
Blessed with great wealth, recognition, and influence, fame is also plagued with several mental health challenges emanating from the constant pressure to maintain a public image, an impact from social media, and a toll of success in their way.
Still, the candor that has been displayed by celebrities such as Princess Diana, Britney Spears, Robin Williams, Lady Gaga, and Dwayne Johnson sheds some light on the issues while bringing down the stigma that mental health problems are supposed to carry. In so doing, such celebrities could offer comfort and validation to people facing similar struggles and, most significantly, add to a broader cultural shift in which their struggles are seen as part of the human experience.
It is worth pointing out that, in as much as everyone else, celebrities are
too human and what they are equally entitled to is care, support, and
understanding: much more in a social setup that is appreciating more and more
the complexities of fame and mental sickness. Their stories serve to remind one
that mental health is but a universal human issue, and that no one, whatsoever,
is immune to these challenges, regardless of status or successes.
.