Celebrity psychopathology

Here's a great magazine version of beach reading from New York Metro: "Celebrity Psychos -- The Summer They All Went Mad." Despite its tabloid-like headline, Vanessa Grigoriadis pulls together an intelligent, substantive and very readable analysis of what it feels like to be a celebrity in this fame-crazed age. Besides, what can be better than the rare article that makes you more than content with your lot in life?

Here's an excerpt from what is a very long essay:

Not content to leave the study of celebrities to tabloid body-language experts, the psychological community is coming to terms with celebrity psychopathology. The modern medical term -- the famous term, the celebrity term, the superstar of psychological monikers -- is acquired situational narcissism (coined by a doctor who may know whereof he speaks, since he refused an interview because he didn’t appear in the “Best Doctors� issue of this magazine).

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.