Silence is deadly

As generally happens when a celebrity dies suddenly, the vultures (read: tabloid speculators) have begun circling over Brittany Murphy (again, the right way to spell her name, look it up).  The latest fodder for gossip is her use of prescription drugs, among them Klonopin, Atavan, Fluoxetine, Vicoprofen and Propranolol.  When you rattle off a bunch of pharmaceutical names in a row like that, it seems rather ominous.  Why was she taking all those?  Did she overdose?  Did Brittany’s doctors cause her death?  What nefarious scheme was afoot at Casa de Murphy and Monjack (her husband) to support the continued abuse of narcotics?  Before we get off on a tangent, I’m gonna make this drama simpler, if not less dramatic.

Hollywood is a lot like the rest of the world, though writ large for everyone to see.  Whatever actors and musicians and non-specified celebrities do pretty much mirrors what we “regular people” do in our own lives.  We all hide what we don’t want seen.  The average person hides medicines in a drawer when company comes, safe from the prying eyes of those who just must peek in the medicine cabinet.  You know you’ve done it.  Or we see a shrink in another town so nobody we know will see us going in or coming out.  Or we travel under pseudonyms and have or assistants fetch our prescriptions so TMZ doesn’t find out what we’re taking.  Or we just lie and keep secrets and hope certain things about ourselves never come up.  No matter who’s doing it, or how much money, power and influence they wield, it’s still subterfuge.  And it may be killing us.

Here’s what I think about poor Ms. Murphy.  She had diabetes, which is “documented”.  She suffered from some kind of body image issue, which is sadly de rigueur among young starlets.  She probably had bipolar disorder, according to the anti-anxiety and antidepressant medications in her possession.  I’m a little fuzzy on the rest of her condition…perhaps she had a heart problem, and/or an addiction to pain medication.  Or she had surgery and needed narcotics from a few different doctors so the tabloids wouldn’t report it as addition.  I would wager that Brittany needed some time on “the inside”, not drug rehab, but some kind of psychiatric facility.  Of course going to rehab is like going on vacation in LA, so much so that we watch people do it on TV shows.  But checking into a mental ward is verboten, just ask Mischa Barton, whose 5150 psych hold earlier this year was blamed on some bad dental work.  Uh-huh, blame it on the No-No-No-No-No-Novocain.

At this most wonderful time of the year, we should stop judging people, least of all those about whom we know so little.  We should also start fessing up about our own shortcomings, likely a source of our criticism of others.  Celebrities are easy targets because they seem so untouchable, so “perfect” that we have a hard time believing they could have real problems.  Stand back because I’m getting on my soapbox again.  Many people criticized Maia Campbell’s erratic behavior caught on tape this year.  Message boards said things like “she’s a crack whore” and called her terrible names.  The truth is, Campbell – like her late mother, author Bebe Moore Campbell – has bipolar disorder and was very much out of treatment this year when a sick-minded man exploited her condition on videotape and on the Internet.  The truth is also that Maia was on drugs, and she was selling her body to numb the pain of her own disease, or of her mother’s death, or whatever human emotion was so unbearable it needed to disappear, but quick.  Ready for some more truth:  you’ve been there too, where it hurts so badly you don’t think you can make it another second.  Fortunately, nobody was there with a camera, or a videotape, or a recorder poised to make money off your pain.

By the way, what secrets would we find in your medicine cabinet?