Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be actors

I was very sad to read about the death yesterday of Diff'rent Strokes actor Gary Coleman, who was just 42. I'd had no idea what a troubled life he'd led since the show ended in 1986. But I suppose that I shouldn't have been so surprised. It's a familiar story, after all.

I remember being genuinely upset when I read about Jonathan Brandis' suicide in 2003, not just because he was the same age as me, and not even because I'd had quite the thing for him as a teenager when he'd starred in Stephen King's IT and later in SeaQuest, but because I just couldn't understand how anyone so young, so attractive, so famous could possibly want to kill themselves. Unfortunately, those successes turned out to be the pinnacle of his career which hit the skids after that, spiralling into the usual story of depression and self-loathing that abruptly ended with a young, gifted, attractive man whose best years were still ahead of him feeling as though he had no choice but to take his own life.

And there are so many others like him. A quick trawl through the tragically extensive list of former child actors proves that. Dana Plato, who played Kimberly Drummond in Diff'rent Strokes alongside Gary, died at the age of 35 after struggling with drink and drug addictions for many years. River Pheonix died of a drug overdose at the age of 23. Brad Renfro. Corey Haim. Then there are those who haven't quite reached that stage yet, but undoubtedly have suffered their fair share of problems - Edward Furlong, Lindsay Lohan, Macaulay Culkin, Drew Barrymore, Todd Bridges, the list could go on.

You could blame the Hollywood studios for putting money ahead of the welfare of these kids. You could blame the media for their supercilious chortling and zoom-lens voyeurism when careers nosedive and former child stars are "reduced" to "normal jobs". You could blame the parents for encouraging them to go down this route and then resorting to squabbling over the cash. You could blame society in general for creating the conditions which encourage kids to think that public exposure, no matter what the source, is the Golden Ticket to untold wealth and fame.

Whoever is to blame, perhaps the greatest tragedy is that this won't be the last time we'll be hearing a story like this.

A Beautiful Mind?

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about an article I've just read on the BBC's website entitled, "Creative Minds Mimic Schizophrenia". Whilst not professing to be akin to the likes of Virginia Woolf or John Nash, nonetheless I would like to consider myself a fairly creative individual, and to have something that I had always considered to be a positive trait compared to a mental illness is just a little bit...confusing. Still, I'd also consider myself a scientist, and it's rather hard to argue with the facts. That is, after all, as Thomas Huxley observed, "The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis with an ugly fact."

Psychologist Gary Fitzgibbon states in the article, "Creativity is certainly about not being constrained by rules or accepting the restrictions that society places on us. Of course, the more people break the rules, the more likely they are to be perceived as 'mentally ill'."

Mmm. So what does that say about the more creative thinkers such as Stephen King, H.P Lovecraft, Jules Verne, James Herbert, and the hundreds of other literary geniuses who have had such a huge impact and influence on society to the extent where their ideas have almost been ingrained into the social conscience? Writing is all about making things up for a living, and the wilder and wackier the ideas, the more one would be thought of as 'mentally ill', I suppose. Slightly worrying.

Writing inherently involves having an active fantasy life, after all, which may result from a tendency toward inner reflection rather than outward stimulation, but the defining difference between a writer and a schizophrenic is that the writer, hopefully, has developed a slightly more healthy approach to dealing with their "lack of D2 receptors". Surely that's not such a bad thing? Even if it is a form of escapism from reality that the writer, consciously or unconsciously, is seeking.

It's certainly something to ponder on the next time I get a creative urge. Perhaps I should get one of those plaques to put above my desk: "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps."