Program: Cruel intentions: how toxic tabloids and celebrity culture changed the way we talk about mental health

Sana Qadar: For a few years now, there's been a lot of reminiscing about the early 2000s. The Y2K fashion, the music, and nostalgia for what pop culture looked like before social media. But we've also been reckoning with the darker side of the noughties. How young female stars were treated back then.

Dr Jessica Ford: What typified that era was a kind of cruelty, but also a kind of circus of cruelty and a delight in cruelty. What we were witnessing was people really having quite public struggles with mental health, with addiction, with disordered eating and other such things. And we were sort of conditioned to think of this as kind of just part of celebrity.

Sana Qadar: I'm Sana Qadar. This is All in the Mind. Today, reporter Jen Leake is taking us back to the celebrity tabloid culture of the 2000s. And she's tracking the evolution in how we talk about mental health today. Hey Jen.

Jennifer Leake: Hey, Sana. I am going to start us off with a question. Have you heard of the 20-year nostalgia rule?

Sana Qadar: No, I haven't. What is that?

Jennifer Leake: Basically, it's the idea that popular culture tends to recycle and romanticize the trends and fashions of roughly two decades earlier. So if we think about 1970s nostalgia, that took off in the 1990s.

Sana Qadar: Yes, with the bell bottoms (both laugh).

Jennifer Leake: Exactly. And we're in the 2020s. So now it's all about the 2000s.

Sana Qadar: Yeah, I'm so terrified when I see young people today wearing the stuff I wore when I was in high school. I can't believe I'm old enough to say that's what I wore in high school.

Jennifer Leake: I wanted to pick up on this re-examination of the era, but I wanted to go back and look at how we talked about mental health in the early 2000s. And why there was this appetite for mocking young female stars.

Jo Piazza: It was a fun time to be in celebrity journalism, because it was right before digital, right before social media. All of a sudden, all the celebrity weekly magazines were coming on the scene. There was a lot of competition.

Jennifer Leake: This is author and podcast host Jo Piazza. In the 2000s, she was a young journalist reporting on celebrities. First for the New York Daily News, and then at In Touch Weekly, one of the many tabloid magazines that was so popular back then.

Jo Piazza: I remember we at one point got a tip that Eli Manning, he's a football player here in the US, was getting married in Cabo. And they flew me. They flew me to Cabo in Mexico, checked me into a resort that cost like $2,000 a night just to be at the place and to get details on the wedding. And they flew a paparazzi down with me. They spent probably $50,000 on this one story. But I think they ended up making it back because we then licensed the photos and the story to People magazine.

Jennifer Leake: Early celebrity news websites and gossip blogs, stuff like Perez Hilton and TMZ, they were another feature of the 2000s. The online content wasn't yet cutting into the revenue of the magazines, but they did introduce something new, a constant stream of information about what stars were doing. And it made the tabloid culture faster and more ruthless.

Jo Piazza: I mean, it was just an explosion of places for celebrity news to go. The competition definitely sharpened the desire to crack open more and more salacious stories. That's when I do think we started to see the paparazzi really grow, really get a lot more aggressive. And also, you need something to put in the magazine every week. There weren't enough actual real celebrities to fill that massive news hole. So this is why we saw the rise of the reality stars and the people who were famous for just being famous for doing nothing, because you had column inches to fill every single week and you just needed more celebrities.

Jennifer Leake: Joe mentioned how reality TV stars began to influence celebrity news, and we're going to get to that. But to understand the origins of the tabloid culture in the 2000s, you've got to look at what started changing in the 1990s.

David Kamp: I got this really gross sense in the 90s and early aughts that people were rooting for Anna Nicole Smith to die. People were rooting for Michael Jackson to die. It was like the natural end of the sordid narrative that they were following.

Jennifer Leake: David Kamp is an author and longtime Vanity Fair contributor. In 1999, he wrote an essay for the magazine called The Tabloid Decade. He says in the 90s, sensationalism and scandal became mainstream news, and new forms of media like 24-hour cable news helped to feed the public's appetite for celebrity humiliation and drama. This is the decade of the Pamela Anderson sex tape, Monica Lewinsky and the Menendez brothers.

David Kamp: The thing about the Menendez brothers' story or the Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton story is what they had in common was that there was kind of a blithe treatment of them by so-called serious people, meaning it was all just a joke, like child trauma or someone abusing a power dynamic in the workplace. I'm framing it now in 2024 terms, but back then it was all just, ha, ha, ha, what silly business.

Jennifer Leake: The 2000s introduced a new type of famous person, reality TV stars, and the public and media viewed them differently to regular famous people. Sophie Gilbert published a book earlier this year on the era we're discussing. It's called Girl on Girl, How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves.

Sophie Gilbert: What reality TV did, I think, was introduce this new category of fame, whereas, you know, before reality TV, if you were famous, there was generally a reason you were famous for having a skill, like for being an actor or singer or sports star or there was some kind of thing that you did. But with reality TV, suddenly all you had to do to be famous was to be visible, to be sufficiently visible, like to open up your life to the cameras, to pose enough, to wear the right clothes, like to sort of court attention in this fairly relentless way. And there are certain people who are really good at that, like Paris Hilton, I think, is really good at it. Kim Kardashian and her family are really good at it. But it leads to this real sort of frenzy of overexposure that I think people quite quickly get sick of. And that, and I think is behind so much of the real cruelty of the ways in which women were treated in the 2000s, this idea that we were resenting the women who made us look at them and we were sort of resenting ourselves because we couldn't tear our eyes away. Like we were fascinated, but we didn't want to be.

Jennifer Leake: Celebrities in the 2000s were relentlessly followed by the paparazzi, especially in LA, where they were renowned for being aggressive and intrusive. Matthew Suarez was just out of college when he started working for an agency that sold celebrity photos to magazines. This is how he managed to get a photo of Lindsay Lohan in a bikini. He'd been sent to the hotel she was staying at in Hawaii. And this photo ended up on the cover of a magazine.

Matthew Suarez: I stay in my room with the biggest lens I've ever used. And she's in the pool with a bikini. She smokes a cigarette. Hotel security is like, you can't smoke by the pool. So she gets kicked out and they put her basically right in front of me. But I'm very far away because I'm in a huge lens hidden behind curtains in my room. And she stays in front of me for like an hour and a half. And I'm just clicking, clicking, clicking, clicking, thinking, holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. While she's just basically in front of me in a white bikini with her friends smoking a cigarette. It's like 150 or 250 pictures I took.

Jennifer Leake: So you send these to your agency. They obviously go through the roll and decide what shot. How did they choose to depict Lindsay in those photos? What were the headlines? What was the story around the photos you took?

Matthew Suarez: It's my only cover photo that was a half page. In Touch Magazine, Lindsay, skin and bones. And next to her is Hugh Jackman, best and worst beach bodies. So they call her the worst bikini body in that summer. And all the magazines treated her as such too. Like, oh, Lindsay looks like too skinny and too bony. Again, for me, she looked great. But magazines have different standards for people. So they were just like, oh, she looks gross in Hawaii.

Jennifer Leake: Are there any examples where you captured something that a celebrity was going through? Or not even going through, but maybe you could see they were in a particular mood?

Matthew Suarez: I mean, there's horrible moments in the job. I took pictures of Brittany Murphy's mom after Brittany Murphy died. And my job sent me to take this. She arrived again at the airport. And she's crying by the carousel. And I'm there with five other photographers taking pictures of this lady crying because her daughter was a star and she just died. And she's in L.A. for the body and the funeral and all the drama. And, yeah, you feel bad. You don't want to do the job. And that picture sold a lot.

Hadley Meares: It was such a destructive time, I think, for so many women in Los Angeles because you were seeing all these women who had made it. Women like Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears. But they were constantly being mocked and made fun of and torn down. And it was almost seen as part of the job and a signification that they had really, in some way, also achieved something.

Jennifer Leake: Hadley Meares is a Hollywood historian. But in the early 2000s, she had just moved to Los Angeles with dreams of becoming an actress. She says the early celebrity gossip blogs had a big influence on how young stars were treated by the media.

Hadley Meares: The internet changed everything. And Perez Hilton is kind of the quintessential example of the kind of dirt bag, grass roots media that started to spring up. And Perez had enormous influence for what was really just a blog spot. And there would be all these awful pictures that he'd post of somebody looking bad, stepping out of a car after a night on the town. I guarantee you all of us look bad stepping out of a car after a few drinks at 2 a.m. And, you know, he'd draw like penises around their face and, you know, put devil horns on them. I mean, really villainizing these people. And it started to desensitize you. I know it started to desensitize me as somebody in her late teens and early 20s to what was appropriate and what was kind.

Jennifer Leake: Looking back on this period, there was the standard level invasive photos and stories, and then the celebrities who were obviously struggling with something serious. And the most closely watched was Britney Spears. Jo Piazza, who worked for a weekly tabloid magazine in the 2000s, says covering the Britney story was intense.

Jo Piazza: You've literally never seen so many paparazzi and a scrum of reporters descend on one story at once. And, you know, I didn't just cover Britney's breakdown, but then I covered when she came back on the scene as well. And I remember that she threw... it was a birthday party slash record release party. And it's actually the opening of my book, Celebrity Inc. And she was so little, so small, surrounded by just the scrum of paparazzi and reporters, all kind of feeding on her and her story and her trauma. And I just remember thinking that she was like a trapped little animal in a zoo. She didn't even feel or seem like a real person a lot of the time.

Jennifer Leake: The UK singer Amy Winehouse is another tragic example. Her very visible struggle with addiction was often joked about in the media, even after she died. Here's Sophie Gilbert. She's a staff writer for The Atlantic.

Sophie Gilbert: It was awful. The treatment of her was awful. I remember Perez Hilton nicknamed her Wino, obviously, like mocking her addiction. I remember the day she died, I went on Facebook. Someone I knew had left a post saying, oh, well, she was a drug addict. You know, you get what you get. And it was this complete lack of care, lack of empathy, lack of understanding about the complexity of addiction and the complexity of fame and of this long history of musicians struggling. But just the ways in which she was treated while she was alive as well was so cruel. They were so characterized by disgust. They were so dehumanizing. Like the ways in which people talked about her physical appearance. And, you know, when she went out clearly disheveled and she'd have sometimes like bloodied wounds on her legs. And obviously, like a person who's really, really in crisis. There was just a complete lack of empathy. And it's really shocking to go back and look at it now.

Sana Qadar: This is All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar. So the tabloid frenzy of the 2000s hardly made for healthy discussions around mental health. But thankfully, we have evolved a bit since then. And Jen Leake is reporting today's episode. Jen, when do you think things actually started to change in terms of how we talked about mental health?

Jennifer Leake: Well, it happened gradually, of course, and we're going to go through some of the changes. A lot of it has to do with the rise of social media and the Internet. But one shift Sophie Gilbert explained to me started in the early 2010s. And it's when the public began to see it was not only celebrities that could be shamed online.

Sophie Gilbert: I'm sure you remember around the sort of early 2010s, there was this real kind of epidemic of public shaming online. And of call out culture where I think for the first time, this national pastime of sort of shaming people for bad behavior that had been focused on celebrities was suddenly expanded out to anyone who did anything bad online. And so there was this idea that suddenly ordinary people could be very vulnerable, like anyone could have a pile on, anyone could have an errant tweet or like an unfortunate turn of phrase and could be instantly famous or viral for all the wrong reasons. And I think when people started to realize what that element of shaming felt like, we became much more sympathetic towards the celebrities we'd been scrutinizing. It was like it allowed us to empathize and to connect with people more broadly.

Jennifer Leake: We started talking about celebrities differently, partly because the tabloid boom of the 2000s started to decline. The weekly magazines, which had been so profitable, started getting squeezed by digital. And as their ad revenue dropped, the publishers could no longer afford to spend loads on covering celebrities. And that, of course, flowed through to the paparazzi, who were also getting impacted by the arrival of Twitter and Instagram. Famous people were now able to post their own photos and stories, and it handed them back a lot of control.

Sophie Gilbert: Really, starting in the 90s when Pamela Anderson's sex tape was stolen, it was this moment when women seemed to sort of lose control over their public image and over the ways in which their physical self was portrayed in the media. Like after that, it was sort of open season on any woman who went out in the world. But what Instagram did and social media was it gave famous women back control over their image, and especially about the information that they conveyed with that image. So instead of being seen on a magazine in an unflattering photo that maybe showed them in ways they didn't want to be portrayed, they could post pictures that they controlled, they could post information, they could post these sort of very heartfelt personal messages underneath.

Jennifer Leake: And through social media, celebrities started going public with their struggles. Showing vulnerability became a symbol of authenticity, instead of something that could damage their personal brand. Here's David Kamp again. He's been a Vanity Fair contributing editor since the 1990s.

David Kamp: Well, celebrities or any well-known person can be way more direct via Instagram or TikTok or what have you, in just communicating and kind of breaking down the walls of privacy to some degree. But also, again, destigmatizing, like I'm going through something, and I'm not going to wait for a tabloid to break this story. I'm just going to show you like, fam, I've not been doing well lately. I'm going to take some me time. You hear those speeches now. And people respond to them with remarkable sympathy. It's no longer like, oh, she's definitely on drugs or, oh, he's definitely cheating on his wife. It's like, oh, they're going through something. We should we should respect that. Now, by the same token, social media brings its own wealth of pathologies with it, such as people whose fame owes its entire existence to social media. And then they have a kind of rise and fall, not unlike the child stars that we used to watch in the 70s, 80s, 90s. You can see someone achieve critical mass incredibly quickly via TikTok. And then it's all taken from them a year later because they screwed up somehow. So it never dies, that cycle of sadness. It takes different forms. But by the same token, social media, you know, kind of enables a nice sense of community between famous people and their audiences.

Jennifer Leake: Because celebrities can now choose to bypass traditional media and talk directly to their fans, the sense of connection to that celebrity can feel much stronger. Dr. Jess Ford is a feminist media studies scholar at the University of Adelaide.

Dr Jessica Ford: Particularly in the 90s and the early 2000s, we really were reading the same sort of handful of websites, the same handful of magazines. And if you were invested in celebrity culture, then you were participating in that kind of relatively small ecosystem. Now, I'm not saying that the ecosystem is bigger now, but it's definitely far more fractured. We have many different avenues in which people can consume. And part of the sort of effects of having these individual celebrities, having social media and the capacity to talk to us, is that there is a kind of increased emphasis on empathy and emotions. That, you know, it's forming that emotional connection. Now, I'm not saying that social media makes us more empathetic, but I'm also not saying it doesn't. I'm saying that there is a kind of, there are ways that social media can be used to create empathetic relationships between sort of celebrities and their fans.

Jennifer Leake: When stars like Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Amy Winehouse, when these stars were written about, it was all about the train wreck, the breakdown, the crisis. We didn't use any of the kind of language that we use today when we think about someone who's in distress. Now, we didn't really have that language back then, did we? So, yeah, it's kind of like, well, we were never going to describe it appropriately because we hadn't kind of got there as a culture yet anyway.

Dr Jessica Ford: That's part of it, is that we didn't have the kind of general knowledge or general understanding of mental health and the ways in which mental health manifests in a range of different behaviours and activities. But I think to sort of just say, oh, well, we didn't know any better is actually kind of selling us a bit short as a culture because I think we did know better. I think we did know that it was not OK and was not acceptable to cruelly mock people and to belittle people, even if they were famous. But I think we were conditioned by a media culture in which these things were normalised to sort of just accept them as the status quo.

Jennifer Leake: We can now look back on the treatment of celebrities like Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse and view their stories in the context of mental health, addiction or misogyny. But does having a better understanding of celebrity mental health actually translate to having a better understanding of mental health in society more broadly? Nick Haslam is a professor at the University of Melbourne. He researches how concepts in mental health change over time.

Speaker 10: Seeing Britney's struggles through the lens of mental ill health probably is more empathic, more appropriate and more understanding and probably more beneficial to her than making her a public spectacle. But that doesn't mean that overall I think we've become more empathic. We certainly are in some respects. We're less likely to stigmatise people who are anxious or depressed, but we're more likely to stigmatise people who have schizophrenia and more likely to fear them and see them as unpredictable and violent and scary. So I think it's a very mixed kind of picture. But in no way am I suggesting this is a bad thing. I think it's probably much more sensible and thoughtful and sympathetic and compassionate to frame someone's distress as a mental health problem than the alternatives because the alternatives are often quite unpleasant. Seeing the person as being a freak, seeing the person as being immoral, seeing the person as having bad character, those are even worse ways of talking about someone's problems. But of course, there is also a downside to seeing things exclusively through a psychiatric lens because that can also, if you like, hold the person at a distance.

Jennifer Leake: Do you think now that someone might use the word bipolar or they're going to use more mental health kind of language, is that better?

Clinical Professor Jonathan Shedler: I don't think it's better or worse. The primary issue is we're not relating to them as whole three-dimensional human beings. It's almost like there's some kind of unspoken societal agreement that we're not going to acknowledge that these are people. They're projection screens for us to project our own desires and fears and our own view of ourselves and our own view of the world. It's like the person on the other end is irrelevant.

Jennifer Leake: Jonathan Shedler is a clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California. He says examining how we critique celebrity behavior today can offer some clues about what's changed in our culture. This is what he noticed reading the comments on a video Britney Spears posted of herself dancing earlier this year.

Clinical Professor Jonathan Shedler: She posted a video of herself, you know, really looking pretty strange and out of control. It was on Twitter and there was just a flood of comments about it. There was zero agreement between the people commenting, not just about what they were making of it, but zero agreement about what they literally saw and heard on the video that was in front of all of us. Some people saw a very serious disturbance, possibly she was in the midst of a bipolar mood manic episode. And other people were completely in denial about that. Oh, you know, she's just having fun and goofing around. It was like some people understood what mental illness, serious mental illness looks like. And some people were flat out in denial that it could even exist.

Jennifer Leake: Jonathan says the very different reactions to the video are an example of splitting. That's when a person interprets a situation or individual as either all good or all bad. And Jonathan thinks this behavior has become more common.

Clinical Professor Jonathan Shedler: There was a book in the 80s, it was very famous, it was called The Culture of Narcissism. And, you know, the sort of expose of the foibles of that cultural time. And, you know, I think if somebody wrote a comparable book today, it would probably have to be called something like The Culture of Borderline Personality Pathology and Splitting. Except it doesn't make for a very pithy title. But there's a lot of cultural splitting now that I don't remember in the 80s or the 90s. Something has changed. It's like if narcissism was a culturally salient defense in the 80s, I think something actually more concerning is the prevailing cultural defense now. And that's what all the polarization is in society. We have defenses at an individual level, but then what happens when they play out in society and at the group level? You know, it's like my side versus your side. My side is right and your side is wrong. My side is good and your side is evil and must be destroyed, must be defeated. Of course, the other side feels the same way. Everybody's doing it. There's something going on, I think, that's pulling for the worst sides of human nature.

Jennifer Leake: What about just our general empathy and understanding and sort of the stigma around mental health? I mean, that has improved.

Clinical Professor Jonathan Shedler: I don't know if it's improved. We just have a new set of labels to apply to things we don't understand and to people we don't know. And what I see a lot is what I call therapy-speak. This language, it's trauma. And the other person is a narcissist and everybody has a diagnosis and it becomes an identity. And people want diagnosis and identity. It's all this therapy-speak psychobabble about boundaries and self-care. I don't think it's in that good because it's the words without the substance. It's like the language of doing psychological work, the language of self-examination, self-reflection, of awareness, which is really hard work and often painful work. It's the language in place of the reality.

Jennifer Leake: If you're a female in particular and you remember the 2000s tabloid culture, it's an interesting experience to reflect back and see what's changed for the better. But Jess Ford says what can be harder to notice is what's actually stayed the same or gotten worse in a new way.

Dr Jessica Ford: We want to be really careful that we don't use our criticisms of the past or our attempts to critique the past as a way of obscuring the sins of the present because we don't want to sort of say, well, we don't do that anymore. When of course there are many things about that sort of early 2000s culture that remain embedded in our culture today. And we've also got other things that we need to address, both in terms of the social, cultural impact of popular culture, particularly on young people.

Sana Qadar: That is Dr. Jessica Ford, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Adelaide. You also heard from Professor Jonathan Shedler from the University of California, Professor Nick Haslam from the University of Melbourne, as well as David Kamp, author and longtime contributor to Vanity Fair magazine, Sophie Gilbert, staff writer at The Atlantic, Jo Piazza, author and host of the podcast Under the Influence, Hadley Meares, Hollywood historian, and Matthew Suarez, author of Paparazzi Days, Celebrity Encounters. This episode was reported and produced by Jennifer Leake. Thanks also to producer Rose Kerr and sound engineer Simon Branthwaite. I'm Sana Qadar. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time on All In The Mind.