Ask Dr. Ding

Dear Dr. Ding.

What is your opinion on the number of starlets going into rehab? I think it’s just a copout for when people get into trouble, then they can claim that their substance abuse or addiction made them do stupid things. But maybe then again being famous is hard and causes them to drink or take drugs? I was overseas for almost a year, and I came back to the U.S two months ago. and started hearing about all these young Hollywood actors and celebrities going to rehab or even jail for drugs, DUI, and all kinds of other things involving drugs and alcohol. Why is this happening?

Sign me Puzzled in Paramus

Dear Puzzled:

Dr. Ding thinks the number of starlets, celebutards, young actors, etc entering “rehab” is far too low. I mean, just look at the outfits these kids are wearing! They hire people to dress them for like $5,000 a day, and they end up looking like young Dr. Ding during her I’m-a-punker-but-I-can’t-afford-anything-but-Kmart phase in the mid-1980s. Not a pretty time. This says to me that they’re ALL on drugs, pretty heavy ones at that. Puffed sleeves are a direct result of black tar heroin. Trust.

Doing drugs is as choice (and let’s include alcohol as a drug here). Doing stupid stuff is also a choice, but it’s a lot easier to do if you’re under the influence of stuff that makes you think horizontally striped off-the-shoulder Flashdance outfits are to be worn in public. Addiction to drugs is considered a kind of mental illness, or, in some circles even a “disease,” one that affects behavior, choices, personality, values, relationships, you name it. But, to respond to your question; famous people are no more at risk for addiction than non-famous people; drug addiction is definitely an equal-opportunity phenomenon, afflicting poor and rich alike, stupid and smart, successful and unsuccessful. Oh, and also fashion victims as well as the truly stylish.

[By the way….treatment for drug addiction really isn’t “rehab”—the term “rehabilitation” implies there’s a healthy lifestyle to which once can return, whereas this is virtually never the case when dealing with addiction.]

To respond further, sometimes going to drug treatment is a copout, and sometimes it’s not. It all depends upon what one learns while there, and how open one is to the recovery process, which usually asks a person to change lots of things about the way they live their life besides the actual drug-taking.

If a celebutard takes drugs, crashes a car or five, goes to treatment, then quits drugs and decides to stop hanging out with his or her enablers, that’s a success. And let’s face it, it’s kinda boring. We seldom get to hear about the Hollywood stars who have been to drug treatment and just quietly gone about the business of remaining in recovery. Smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee with your sponsor from AA ain’t exactly riveting stuff for most of us.

But… if a celebrity enters treatment, goes through the motions, gets out early and heads right back to the same old nightclubs and hangouts, shows their literal (as opposed to metaphorical) ass a few times, then that’s a clinical failure, but it’s a raging PR success, and the public eats it up.

Dr. Ding suspects that the media focus on the various pathetic carousing-related incidents seemingly plaguing young Hollywood is probably a very convenient way of avoiding placing the national attention on things like the war in Iraq or horrid West Virginia hillbillies who like to torture people, or the coming Social Security crisis. In other words, it’s not that suddenly you’ve come home to some sort of sudden burst of stupid celebutard behavior, because famous mouth-breathers have been engaging in really stupid shit for at least a few millenia by now. It’s just that as a nation we don’t want to think about the more serious issues. So, we do things instead like interview Paris Hilton on Larry King Live as if she has an actual complete thought to share, and have nightly news coverage about talentless reality-tv fuckers whose sole claim to fame is hating their best friend or being a complete tool. Whoopee fuckin’ do.

So, Puzzled, Dr. Ding is just as befuddled as you are. We’ve somehow become a nation of enablers, helping to pay celebrities for their misdeeds and bad habits via creating a demand for continuous media consumption of their naughty, bare-bottomed drug-addled images. What this says to me is that we’re quite powerfully bored with our own lives and are turning to the twisted wreckage of what passes for a Hollywood lifestyle as a means of getting some kind of mental stimulation or entertainment. Ew. I mean, just how many crotch shots of Britney or Lindsey do we need before we finally feel something besides our own seething ennui? Exactly how many “nip slips” is enough?

That said, Dr. Ding particularly enjoys a tasty little website called Pretty On The Outside, which features creative caricatures of the rich-n-famous, so I suppose I’m just as guilty as everyone else here. I’m not advocating we never check out the gossip blogs, but I think we would benefit from a more balanced approach to the information we consume about those rascally, felonious, attention-seeking, poltroons.

Dr. Ding recommends we all get healthier, more divergent interests. Start collecting bottlecaps, for chrissakes. Research your family geneaology. Grow a bonsai tree. Take up belly dancing or karate or some kind of churchy shit, something anything that gets one occasionally away from this cultural wasteland of obsessive fascination with ill-informed, overpaid, fundamentally uninteresting fucked-up famous people doing fucked-up things.

My f-bomb limit counter has exceeded its bandwidth, so I’ll have to end this post or else I won’t be able to drop them later this week when I might need to. So, hang in there, Puzzled. Enjoy the thin-crust pizza there in Jersey, and welcome home to your highly culturally developed country.