One of the most recognisable images from the first decade of the millennium featured a pretty pop star exiting a barbershop with a shaved head in place of the platinum blonde locks she had entered with. It was February 2007, and you can probably name that pop star more quickly than you can name the prime minister of Canada.

“Bald and broken,” cried ABC News in its story about Britney Spears, then 26 and in the midst of a public breakdown. Nearly eight years later, she is on the cover of this month’s Women’s Health magazine and has her own best-selling Las Vegas show. It is progress worth celebrating, but the heavily mocked calls from that period to “leave Britney alone” are still seen as a joke – instead of as a lesson.

Enter Scott Stapp, the former lead singer of Creed and the new face of public celebrity breakdowns. Last week TMZ released audio recordings of his distressed calls to the police, including paranoid rants about his family and the CIA. Reports say Stapp’s wife is trying to commit him to a psychiatric hospital. He was placed on a temporary, involuntary 72-hour hold in November and has lost custody of his three children. And still we watch.

“I think media depictions of celebrity breakdowns are more about soundbites and great videos for a hungry public than they are for portraying these people in a humane way,” said Lawrence Rubin, a psychologist and St Thomas University professor.

In fiction, he added, mental illness can make for an interesting and complex story; Academy Awards often go to films and actors depicting serious mental illness. Such storylines also satisfy the human desire to see into the most personal parts of other people’s lives. “When it crosses over from fiction to nonfiction, it satisfies the same need to satisfy the bloodlust in us,” Rubin said.

And while it might be convenient to blame companies like TMZ, the site has grown into a $55m empire because such material is avidly read. “The media has a way of showing us at our ugliest and most vulnerable and that draws attention, that sells copy, that buys airtime, that sells the photograph,” said Rubin.

After TMZ released Stapp’s paranoid calls to police, the media response was unsympathetic, with Perez Hilton running the headline: “Creed’s Scott Stapp Was Told By The CIA To Assassinate President Obama!? Get All The Crazy Deets HERE!”

“If he had been diagnosed with cancer and had some kind of reaction to chemo or drugs or treatment or something, and his behaviour was a result of that, we would not be seeing this kind of coverage,” said Wanda Little Fenimore, a visiting assistant professor of rhetoric at Hampden-Sydney College. “But because he seems mentally ill, that’s treated completely differently.”

While personal breakdowns typically have traumatic effects on entire families, when they affect the glamorous lifestyles of the rich and famous schadenfreude often seems to be the pre-eminent emotion in media coverage. (Perez Hilton’s blog did show some empathy, however, by tagging the story “mental health” and “sad sad”.)



Fenimore added that because information about stars’ breakdowns is presented without context – like how most mental health care is only treated at crisis moments because of a collusion of problems, including the challenges of involuntarily committing someone – it is difficult for the audience to develop a deeper understanding of the issues. “Instead what they have knowledge of is the behaviour manifestations of that [illness], which prevents any understanding or empathy,” said Fenimore.

The story of actor Amanda Bynes, suffering from bipolar disorder, has been playing out in the tabloids and on social media. She was put in an involuntary mental health hospitalisation in California in 2013, then again in October this year.

A year previously, Bynes’s mother put out a statement saying that “almost 99%” of things put out about her daughter are false or misleading. “Unless it’s a statement issued by our family attorney, Tamar Arminak, please take everything you read about Amanda with a grain of salt,” Lynn Bynes said.

And while the parallels between her case and Britney Spears’s breakdown are impossible to miss, she has faced the same harsh scrutiny: there are still articles coming out about Bynes’s “very bad year” and cataloguing “the breakdown of a meltdown”. There is even a Huffington Post vertical for “Amanda Bynes conservatorship”.

Fenimore said that when psychiatric hospitalisations and other developments in treatment are covered in tabloids, they tend to be framed in a negative way, instead of being framed as important progress. This can further add to the stigma tied to mental health issues. “Policy does not change unless the public wants it to change, and that desire is not there because it is so sensationalised and dramatic and negative,” said Fenimore.