The cost of fame

London: Talent show contestant Susan Boyle’s giddying rise from unemployed Scottish church volunteer to global superstar has come at a price, in what is being seen as a cautionary tale for the celebrity age.

On the way up, the 48-year-old’s performance last month of ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ on television series Britain’s Got Talent was downloaded nearly 200 million times on the Internet, and within days Boyle was headline news around the world. Camera crews camped outside the home where she lived alone with her cat; Larry King and Oprah Winfrey invited her on to their US shows and tabloid newspapers tracked her every move.

But as the pressure built ahead of Saturday’s final, which Boyle had been runaway favourite to win, she was reduced to tears, threw a tantrum and threatened to pull out of the show. On Sunday, after her shock defeat by dance troupe Diversity, the singer was admitted to a clinic in London that treats people with mental health problems, suffering from exhaustion. She had an “emotional breakdown.”

“Being famous is not all it’s cracked up to be, and the idea that you can have a personal life and a media life is often pretty conflicting,” said David Moxon, a health psychologist who specialises in stress.

“It must be difficult to walk down the street and be mobbed by people. She was pursuing a love of singing that she had and that is the sad part of this story. But it is a cautionary tale for people and it shows fame has its price.”

Moxon and others said people’s reaction to pressure was impossible to predict. The fact that Boyle was starved of oxygen at birth leading to learning difficulties, according to show judge Piers Morgan, may have affected her ability to cope. Experts question whether shows like Britain’s Got Talent and American Idol are unnecessarily cruel.

Judge Simon Cowell in particular is renowned for his acerbic put-downs of less accomplished acts, some of which are watched by tens of millions of people. One of Boyle’s co-finalists, Hollie Steel, burst into tears during her faltering semi-final performance and begged to be allowed to try again. Aged 10, she was deemed by many to be too young to appear on the show. And a potential American Idol contestant, ridiculed by Cowell after her audition, apparently committed suicide in November outside the home of fellow judge Paula Abdul.

Morgan, who backed Boyle throughout Britain’s Got Talent, put some of the blame for her travails on the media and public. “Show business is a fickle business, and the reality TV end of it even more so,” Morgan said in his blog on the show’s website, written before Boyle was admitted to a clinic.

On the other hand, a Paris court ruled on Wednesday that appearing in reality TV shows constitutes work and that participants should therefore be given an employment contract by TV companies to cope with pressure, experts predict a bright future for the singer.

“Production companies can no longer use individuals like they have been doing for years, making them do whatever they want 24 hours a day,” said lawyer Jeremie Assous after the ruling by the final court of appeal.   Assous was representing three clients from a show called Temptation Island in which viewers follow couples who are separated on a tropical island where professional “tempters” try to seduce them.

State of mind

Truman Syndrome, is described as a growing number of psychotic patients who describe their lives as mirroring that of the main character played by Jim Carrey in the 1998 film The Truman Show

With internet delusion, patients incorporate the internet into paranoid thoughts, including a fear that the web is somehow monitoring or controlling their lives

Turabosis is the belief that one is covered in sand, and which has been documented in Saudi Arabia

A study found a delusion occurring only in rural West Bengal, India, in which women and men bitten by dogs believe they have become pregnant with puppies