Britney Spears

 

In the entertainment industry, young female stars face a unique rite of passage: the performance for which they'll bare it all. It is ironic that for a young starlet to make the transformation to a “serious” performer, she is expected to show some skin.

What do the secret lives of Britney Spears and Virginia Woolf have in common? More than you think.

The hunger for celebrity gossip appears unslakable; there's a reason paparazzi and gossip-mongers can always find employment in Los Angeles. Even in periods of economic depression, in fact perhaps especially in periods of economic depression, the public demands stories about celebrity shenanigans and it particularly wants stories about celebrities gone bad. Celebrities losing control. It consumes, with relish, stories about celebrity breakdowns because many people seem to enjoy a sense of "how the mighty have fallen" over their morning gossip rag.

Working in Hollywood is intensely stressful, which can tend to add to the risks of experiencing mental illness. It is a highly pressured, fast-paced environment, especially for women, who have to fight twice as hard to attain half the popularity and following of their male peers, while remaining "strong" so they can be the subject of flattering profiles rather than lurid tabloid covers. Drug and alcohol abuse tend to be high in this environment as well; I've attended enough Hollywood parties as a non-drinker to know that you experience tremendous pressure to imbibe even when you have good reasons not to do so. While neither drug nor alcohol abuse is necessarily a cause of mental illness, both can cause erratic behavior and they may trigger latent mental illness, especially in a patient who is held under the looking glass instead of being given adequate support.

A look ahead at Miley Cyrus's transition out of Hannah Montana, which airs its final season on the Disney Channel this summer.

Read on for 5 things I don't want to read about anymore: