Are celebs making you narcissistic?

In “The Mirror Effect,” addiction and behavioral specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky and his co-author Dr. S. Mark Young examine the ways in which society’s willingness to admire, accept and copy celebrities is doing damage to our relationships and families. An excerpt.

She’s tried singing, acting, modeling, even writing a book but, in the end, she’s most famous for being famous. She seems to glide through a glamorous world of prestige and privilege, where the usual rules don’t apply. When she violated her probation after being arrested for drunk driving, neither her celebrity nor her parents’ wealth was enough to keep her out of jail, at least for four days.

She’s a fixture on the club scene and a favorite of the paparazzi. Increasingly erratic in her job performance, she’s now better known for her highly publicized hookups, drunk-driving arrests, consecutive stints in rehab, and apparent fondness for cocaine than she is for the acting skills that made her famous in the first place. Her dysfunctional parents are in the tabloids almost as much as she is. With her fame-seeking family encroaching on her limelight, everyone’s waiting to see what she’ll do next to get attention.

She’s a supermodel. She wears couture and dates rock stars and millionaires. Only a teenager when she became the darling of the high-fashion set, she’s credited with popularizing heroin chic — the pale, languid, druggy look increasingly prevalent among models so emaciated that they are barely a size 0. However, highly publicized photos of her snorting cocaine, and a succession of romances with drugged-out rock stars, fueled the buzz that she should be in rehab rather than on the runway. Her public apology and promise to work on “various personal issues” stopped short of admitting she had a drug problem, but likely helped to salvage her career. Her employers and admirers were quick to forgive and forget, as her jet-setting lifestyle and reign as a style icon retained their pride of place in both fashion magazines and the tabloids.

From cute preteen, to highly sexualized teen pop star, to crotch-flashing paparazzi magnet, she has often traded on her sexuality to capture attention.

At seventeen, her naughty schoolgirl look and provocative lyrics made her a platinum recording artist with the best-selling single of the year. By the time she was twenty-one, Forbes magazine named her the most powerful celebrity in the world. Her career was derailed by allegations of drug and alcohol abuse, unsuccessful visits to rehab, volatile relationships, and outright bizarre behavior. Five havoc-filled years later, a very public breakdown landed her in a psychiatric hospital and cost her custody of her children. Though a carefully engineered “comeback” seems to spell her return from the brink, it raises the question: Can she stay healthy if she stays in the limelight?

If you read People or US Weekly, regularly check gossip sites like TMZ.com, or watch entertainment news shows or even reality TV, you’re sure to have recognized each of the people described here. Without hearing their names, or their career highlights, you still know exactly who they are. Celebrities today are as likely to be recognized for their bodies, rap sheets, and rehab stints as they are for their talents or résumés.

That’s because the behavior of today’s celebrities is much more dramatically dysfunctional than it was a decade ago. The personal lives of these figures — many of them young, troubled, and troubling —  have become the defining story lines of our entertainment culture, played out in real time and held up for our amusement, scrutiny, and judgment. Celebrity gossip, branded as “entertainment news,” details stories of excessive partying, promiscuity, divalike tantrums, eating disorders, spectacular meltdowns, and drug and alcohol abuse, behaviors that have become more open, more dramatic, and more troubling than in previous generations.

Video   Perez Hilton to Ann Coulter: ‘Bite me!’ TODAY’s Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford catch up on the gossip with celebrity blogger Perez Hilton. He also expresses his strong opinions about author Ann Coulter. Today show

The media still reports on all the traditional celebrity gossip staples: Who’s lost or gained weight; who’s getting married, divorced, or cheated on; who wore what designer to which event; who’s got a new hairstyle (or, these days, a new nose or smoother forehead). Tabloids specialize in the business of making the mundane appear glamorous. In recent years, however, a new breed of extreme, salacious, unflattering dirt, courtesy of the no-holds-barred reporting on cable TV and the Internet, has redefined celebrity reporting and audience expectations.

Never before has it been as possible to feel like an insider in the culture of celebrity as it is today. We all have 24/7 access to the intimate lives of the stars, courtesy of the celebrity media machine. We can gawk at so-called candid photos of celebrities by flipping through US Weekly, In Touch, Life & Style, Star, or People at the supermarket checkout, or follow breaking gossip as it’s streamed to our home or office computers, BlackBerries, or cell phones. (In big cities, it’s even available onscreen in taxis.) We’re privy to a constant parade of sometimes private, often unflattering moments from the lives of our favorite stars, captured by paparazzi with high-tech video cameras or fans with cell-phone cameras, all of it posted on TMZ or YouTube.

Emboldened by the de facto relaxing of libel standards online, bloggers and paparazzi feed us their stories live and up close, with no apparent regard for fact-checking, especially when the reporter witnessed the action firsthand (or even captured it on video). Instead of relying on official press releases or credible inside sources, even mainstream media outlets have become increasingly willing to tackle previously taboo topics in their struggle to keep pace with the new media.

From footage of a dazed-looking Britney Spears strapped to a gurney, to TMZ video of Heath Ledger’s body being removed from his apartment by paramedics, no secret is too private, no tragedy too personal, to be considered off-limits. Life-threatening eating disorders, addictions to drugs and alcohol, self-harming behaviors like cutting or overdoses, trips to rehab and public relapses, sex tapes, and outrageous diva behavior are irresistible celebrity fodder, for both the audience who consumes it and the media outlets that exploit it. And such behavior only seems to add to the celebrities’ fame, with little or no negative consequences for their public reputation.

If that weren’t enough, the cable TV networks have filled their schedules with literally hundreds of reality TV shows, in which past, current, and aspiring stars potentially trade their dignity for a chance to play by the new rules. And those who want to do more than passively observe the antics of the rich and famous can audition to compete for our own fifteen minutes of fame on any of the hundreds of reality television shows. Or we can add our voices to the cultural chatter by anonymously passing judgment on celebrity behavior on Web sites like PerezHilton, Gawker, PopSugar, or TheSuperficial. And those who find tracking celebrities not intimate enough can even use the same media to report on themselves — blogging about their love and sex lives, parenting woes, political views, or even the most minute details of their daily lives. Those who crave the video spotlight can accept the challenge to “Broadcast Yourself” (YouTube’s trademarked slogan) and channel their inner rock star, TV star, even amateur porn star.

As those online platforms have evolved, it’s clear that they’ve given real people a forum to mimic those outsized, troubling behaviors they learn from celebrity gossip media. The Internet serves as an all-access, unmonitored version of unrated TV, on which lines between fantasy and reality are increasingly blurred. Our children, teens, and young men and women now absorb dozens of hours of gossip from the media each week, much of it featuring this celebrity bad behavior. And more and more they are imitating what they see, if only to attract attention from an audience of their peers. Teens are posting sexy, even explicit, photos and videos of themselves online. They are inviting, and engaging in, provocative conversations with strangers through social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook and in online chat rooms. (Chris Hansen’s recent “To Catch a Predator” series for Dateline NBC, a runaway ratings hit, was based on the widespread risk of teenagers being contacted over the Internet for sexual liaisons with strangers.) The Web allows vulnerable young people to project any persona they can imagine in the hope that people might notice them, fall in love with them or, just possibly, make them as famous in real life as they already are in their private fantasies.

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