I think it's very poignant that one of the vigils being held for Liam is in Kensington Gardens at the statue of Peter Pan, the boy who never grew old.
And in a recent interview with the Sunday Times, Bruce Springsteen has said that musicians dying young have sadly become quote-unquote a normal thing following Liam Payne's tragic death on Wednesday.
When you look at the number of people who stardom found them or they found stardom at an early age who then went on to have addiction problems and all sorts of problems, Britney Spears, Tatum O'Neal, Melanie Griffiths, Lindsay Lohan, Drew Barrymore, Macaulay Culkin.
And then when you look at the drug deaths of some of those people, all who died at 27, Jimmy Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Sid Vicious was only 21.
So let's talk about the toxicity. And I think it's interesting. I've talked about what makes you an adult.
And some of the things I'm going to ask are our next guest.
I'm always so thankful to have.
Sam Vaknin is a world-renowned psychologist.
I love and I learn, and I know you learn so much from him as well.
Sam joins me now.
Sam, you know, I was just talking about this study about the milestones to adulthood.
And I was earlier telling a story. I'm not going to say which star, I've heard quite a few of this, but one particular star who didn't even know how to go into a shop and buy a pair of trainers. And when the assistant laughed, they'd been discovered, you know, when mum went out and bought their shoes.
I know somebody else who had never ever camped in a tent because he's been a rock star since he was 15 and didn't know what are these, you know, all of those milestones that they don't have those.
I mean, talk me through what happens when you take a comparatively young person and put them in this weird world where everybody's in love with you, but nobody knows a damn thing about you.
Always good to see you, Trisha.
And it's a bit ironic that I have to give you an interview on celebrity. I mean, I think it should be the other day around. You're a celebrity.
But I'll do my best. I'll do my best under the circumstances.
I think first and foremost, we need to visualize somehow the ambience and the life of a celebrity, especially a celebrity whose fame started early on, in early childhood or perhaps early adolescence.
So first of all, these people are highly isolated. Their experiences are so unique that there's no way they could be understood by anyone else. They can't really share what's happening to them. It is so alien from another planet.
And so there is this profound sense of aloneness. And the greatest loneliness is in crowds, when you're in a crowd. And these people are immersed most of the time in crowds rather than in intimate settings.
The second point to remember is that these people are objectified. Very early on, they become money-making machines. They're perceived by everyone around them, accountants, lawyers, consultants, managers, agents, streaming services. Everyone is using them.
And it reaches a point where use becomes abuse. They're being abused and objectified. They're no longer human beings. No one sees them as human beings. Everyone sees them as a bottom line profit potential. And when they disappoint, they are being treated punitively by everyone.
The next thing is that these people maintain a double life. There is the public persona, the mask, and there's who these people really are. And this distance, this gap between public-facing person and the private person, this gap grinds and is exhausting and ultimately it leads to mental illness.
There are two additional things with your permission that I would like to mention.
These people are subject to aggressive expectations by fans. They're supposed to behave the way the fans want them to behave. It's a straitjacket.
If they stray away from the image, from the brand, from how the fans want them to be, they're punished. Every deviation is immediately castigated and criticized and analyzed.
And so gradually they find themselves reduced to a two-dimensional cardboard cutout. They lose the third dimension. They are no longer full-fledged human beings. They're symbols, their avatars, their icons, and so on.
And the last point I'd like to make is that there's a conflict, a conflict between creativity and routine.
Being a celebrity is much more about routine than about creativity. It's a crushing routine with schedules and timetables and performance targets and obligations and contracts and, you know, it's routine 90% of the time. There's not place left for creativity.
And these are creative people. The fact their creativity is being denied is horrible.
Now, there was a professor at the time in Cornell, and his name was Robert Millman. And Robert Millman discovered something called acquired situational narcissism. He discovered that people who are not narcissists, people who are totally mentally healthy, when they are exposed to fame and celebrity or to riches, money, they become narcissists, full-fledged narcissists.
So this is like late onset narcissism brought on by fame, celebrity, and so on.
Ultimately, all these elements combined push such people to desperate acts, to suicide, to drug abuse, substance abuse, to, they just want to run away. They just want to escape. They want to avoid reality. They want to withdraw.
And some of them withdraw physically. You know, Howard Hughes and Kurt Cobain and someone withdraw physically and some of them withdraw mentally. They become zombie-fied in a way. And some of them just give up on it. And they, you know, come to an end, a bitter end.
I can't understand. I mean I've only had a tiny tiny little bit of it.
I mean I'll do one particular I mean I can tell you so many times I remember when I was pregnant with my younger child and I got some bug and I was, this is in Australia and I, everybody, you know, I was on television how many times a day, anyway, I was at the doctors and I suddenly thought I was going to thrive. I'm heavily pregnant and the first thing that the receptionist holds out, the first thing she could which was the bin so I throw up in the bin pregnant woman and she hands me something which I assumed was a tissue it was an autograph book as I am throwing up can you sign an autograph?
When my child was touch and go in hospital as a baby, and they had me breastfeed her with my door open so they could see the baby because she crashed a number of times and they had to, it was horrible, horrible. I hadn't got out of my 90 I looked like a mess and people stopped to take photographs of me breastfeeding my child this is on a children's emergency ward and again and I told it you know when I had my cancer diagnosis on the morning I came out of the hospital, the news had got to the news desk before I had. I had to, they had to keep moving rooms. The person delivering flowers was really an undercover report. All of this sort of thing.
Now, what it does, you're so right. Number one, you don't trust anybody because even partners, and I think that's it. Are you partners or girlfriends or lovers? You get burned many, many times after you've been convinced that they really love you for you, and then they'll try and sell a story, or it's because they want to get a leg up on the fame ladder, or they want money.
So you're right. It becomes a very isolating world.
Now, that's for an adult. What does that do if, like, all of those people, like Liam Payne, that happens when you're in your adolescence, when you're trying to find your identity, when you want to know who you are, who really loves you.
Well, you're being dehumanized, you're being monetized, you're being pixelated, you're being merchandised, you're being sold. It's slavery. You're being sold simply. You're being commoditized.
Adolescence, let alone children, they don't have defenses. For example, they don't have a fledged core identity to fight back. They don't have boundaries. They are still experimenting with a variety of orientations and attachments and so on, so forth. They don't know who to trust. They have no clear view of what makes other people tick. This is known as theory of mind. They don't mentalize. In other words, they don't fully understand how other people operate. They don't have what we call an internal working model.
An internal working model is a model that encapsulates the way you perceive attachments to other people. It's a work in progress. And if you interfere with this work in progress, it ends badly, of course. It ends being a ruin.
And that's precisely what happens with these people.
The pressures that I've mentioned, the pressures that you have mentioned, the inability of people to relate to celebrities as human beings with their needs, with their fears, with their hopes, with their dreams, with their preferences, and so on so forth, the conversion of the celebrity into a kind of symbolic entity, as I said, an avatar.
This diminishes one's perception of one's existence. So they feel non-existent. This has a name in psychology. It's called the Empty Schizophrenic.
Because they are not allowed to develop in an environment which is containing and supportive, because they're not seen. They're not truly as who they are, but as who they should be or as who they might be, and so on so forth.
Then they don't develop a core and there's an emptiness there. And then they're unable to reconstitute themselves and what they do, they improvise on the fly.
They're like kaleidoscopes. They're like kaleidoscopes. They recombine as they shape-shift, they morph.
And if you do that too often, if you do that too often, then you end up feeling that you do not exist.
And if you do not exist, then why bother? Then it's one step removed from suicidal ideation and worse.
One of the things, again, and I think it's interesting, there's all of these vigils being held and one at the Peter Pan monument, you know, in Kensington Park and what have you.
And that always strikes me. It's not something that I understand.
All of these people mourning somebody that really they knew nothing about. I mean, what is that about? We saw it with Princess Diana, this mass thing.
I mean, don't get me wrong. It's very sad. And many of us thought, oh my God, how sad.
And you might have feelings at home but to travel somewhere and bring flowers and cry and scream together, I mean, is it a particular person that does that because I can't believe every single fan of somebody who's ever bought a one direction record does that. I mean who does that and why?
They are not mourning the celebrity, and they're mourning themselves. They're mourning their connection to the celebrity. They're mourning their memories.
It's an act of collective nostalgia, basically. They are mourning the past that shall be no more.
There's no real mourning of the person because there's no knowledge of the person and has never been knowledge of a person. And there has been a concerted attempt to deny the existence of a person as a separate entity.
The celebrity belongs to the fans. The celebrity is collective property. Celebrity has no right to have a life of his own or her own. Celebrity has no right to personal autonomy, to independence, to experimentation, to agency, to self-efficacy.
The masses, the fans, the followers, they crush the celebrity, they mold the celebrity, as if it were some kind of protoplasm.
So the celebrity is never given a chance to become. The fans prevent the celebrity from becoming because should the celebrity acquire any dependent existence, it would threaten their perception of the celebrity, their memories, their past, and so on.
The biggest enemy of the celebrity is the fan.
Yeah, you know, it reminds me of a time. I've had over my career now, as I say, in Australia, in the UK, here in the US, I've had read so many letters to the editor or comments saying this, and you'll love this, Sam.
Oh, I saw her, sour-faced, oh, you know what. She didn't even smile at me in the street or in the supermarket or in the doctor's waiting room.
Absolutely. They think you know them.
They own you. They all knew. They know.
Or if you at the right time or if you say something that they don't agree with you, I mean, even with messages, oh, I would expect better of you. You know better than that. I never thought you were like that.
I'm a grown up now, and it's taken me many years, and my own mental health struggles for just the reasons you talk about when I can just think, have sex and travel.
But, you know, if you've got all of those people making money out of you, even if you say, I'm tired, I can't go on, that is not allowed. That is not allowed.
Yes, it's a relationship of ownership. The celebrity is a bit like a pet. You know, the celebrity is expected to perform. The celebrity is never, never expected to bite the hand that feeds the celebrity. The celebrity must conform 100% to expectations.
So if there's a musician who wants to experiment with another musical style, this musician will be immediately criticized, harshly, hated, hated online, and so on so forth, if there's a celebrity who decides to not be a celebrity anymore, become a private citizen, to go out.
So the relationship between the fan and the celebrity is what is known in psychology as ambiguity. Ambiguity means a love-hate relationship.
There's a lot of ostentatious love, which is performative, which is affected, is not real. The real emotion is hatred and envy. There's huge envy.
That's the real.
Yeah, very, very true word, Sam. It's always brilliant talking to you. You've articulated it so well and I hope given people something to think about. I do thank you for your time. As I said before, this is why I love talking with Sam Vaknin, who really knows his stuff.
I, honestly, yeah, some of us have to run, you know, and I'm nothing to bear to Liam a pain but um you know I became I was in the public eye from the age of 26 or 27.
People say if you don't like it don't do it. Trust me, even when you don't do it, you don't get away from it. And it's your job. And if it's something you love, like Liam Bain, you love singing, you know, you love journalism or you love whatever you do, you're seriously telling someone give up their whole passion and their whole everything.
If you can't take it, drop out, all of those sorts of things. You know, if you said that to anybody else working in any other career, I mean, you'd be told to do one. Lots more to talk about, so stay with us here. 03449-9-1,000. You can text the word, talk to 87-22 or X at Talk TV. Back with more after this.
Thank you. X at Talk TV. Back with more after this.