Lara de Matos urges a measured response to news of HHP's suicide attempts, and a DJ's seemingly insensitive remark.
|||Famous people are not permitted to experience pain, sadness or suffering. Especially if they’re rich and famous or – the trifecta – if they’re attractive, rich and famous.
The very notion that someone with barrels of money in the bank, endless legions of admirers and the power to pretty much do as they please, should ever have cause to feel blue is downright preposterous. That they should succumb to their sense of despair and consider (or succeed in) taking their own life is about as comprehensible as a play by Anton Chekov!
And it seems peers of these famous folk (or some of them, at any rate) share a similar outlook when it comes to their suicidal counterparts.
“Why would you want to kill yourself when you’re so famous and successful?” was the question posed my Metro FM’s DJ Mo Flava, following fellow ‘man in the music biz’, HHP’s revelations that he had repeatedly attempted to check out of Hotel Planet Earth last year.
The host of the Morning Fix show’s comment was met with grunts and grumbles from listeners both on-air and online who, understandably, felt his seemingly flippant remark was in poor taste, particularly in relation to such a serious matter.
But, if we were to be bluntly honest, many of us have probably pondered much the same point when we’ve learnt of the self-inflicted deaths of those within showbiz circles. In some instances, from a perspective of pure disbelief that the world was robbed of such incredible talents, like Robin Williams, Whitney Houston, Philip Seymour Hoffman or Amy Winehouse; where others were met with a distinctly “oh please!” judgemental tone akin to that expressed by Mo Flava.
So just what is it that leads these personalities – who often take on a god-like (and therefore, untouchable) status in the eyes of us normal plebs – to such drastic measures?
Where HHP (real name Jabulani “Jabba” Tsambo) is concerned, it was a classic case of tumbling from the ivory tower that sparked the onset of depression. “I was struggling to get gigs and radio stations weren’t playing my music anymore,” he told Gareth Cliff during an interview on Cliff Central. “I felt like a loser.”
And while we commoners may scoff at such sentiments, given that we, too, are faced with endless daily struggles and challenges – all of which we are expected to manage sans the moolah, adoration or entourage – studies have shown that extreme wealth and success may, in fact, make you more prone to the blues.
Not least because, as these investigations suggest, the very characteristics that may trigger depression (such as “subtle psychopathic traits” and “an addictive personality”) are the very same attributes that lead these people to the heady heights of unprecedented achievement in the first place!
Further exacerbating the matter is that, according to an article published last year in Forbes Magazine, “clinical depression is much less likely a cause for stardom, but rather, a strange symptom of its presence.”
Reasons range from “wearying competition”, an inability to focus on “the simple things” and feeling “detached from their former selves”; to a change in values system, the pressures of the industry and – my personal favourite – “privilege may make them less resilient”. (Think Oscar Pistorius crying “poor me” and boo-hooing his way through his failed attempt to avoid further prison time.)
And that’s not even to speak of the isolation and loneliness many celebs at the top of their game admit to feeling, despite continuously being surrounded by folks kowtowing to their every whim.
But perhaps that’s the problem. As even US President, Barak Obama, stated during a radio interview earlier this year: “If you… like the title, or you like the trappings, or you like the power or the fame or the celebrity, that side of it wears off pretty quickly.”