Coping with social anxiety disorder under the camera's eye

Every life lost is a sad loss. If we know the person, the death can be a load that some cannot carry without the help of something like Xanax. Then comes Heath Ledger - a man who lived his life in the public eye. It was like we all knew him - so alive one minute; so uncompromisingly dead the next. A few days after his discovery on the 22nd January 2008, the Medical Examiner's Report was published. Heath was relying on Xanax to keep him going. Let's not judge him. Who is to say where the dividing line between genius and madness lies, nor how anyone stays on the right side of that line without help.

Here was a man at the centre of a perfect storm of expectations. The movie studios pitch their latest offerings to you on the backs of the stars who front them. Just think how much money rides on each star name. It used to be that a movie would only cost a few million. Now the production costs can pass $100m without pausing for breath. How does a young man in his twenties cope with that pressure? In 2000, he and Mel Gibson carried The Patriot at just $110m. Then he was headlining and on the run from the pack of celebrity magazines, gossip mongers and their paparazzi photographers who shred your privacy and compete with each other to catch you in your most unguarded moments.

The medical profession define social anxiety disorder as extreme anxiety about facing the judgement of others or behaving in a way that might cause you embarrassment or ridicule. How would you react if, everywhere you look or turn, you find a camera's intrusive lens hoping to catch you in a moment that will sell a million magazines? Even the ordinary becomes the potentially extraordinary depending on how the camera captures it (and how some software package can manipulate it to make it more exploitable). When you know that anything you do or say can and will be misinterpreted for another's profit, is it any surprise that you reach for Xanax? I think not.

In fact, the whole movie industry is probably built on Xanax. Feeling nervous or anxious before you set foot outside your front door knowing you'll be stalked by photographers wherever you go? Take a Xanax. That's not agoraphobia threatening to keep you hiding away, is it? Take another Xanax. The next magazine you open has pictures of you getting (un)dressed in your bedroom. They were taken with a telephoto lens from the building opposite. That's not the first sign of a panic attack is it? Draw the curtains and take another Xanax just to keep on living.

But you need the relationship between public and private to stay blurred. To carry the films, your name has to be on everyone's lips. You have to be the eye candy for the media voyeurism. Drop from those celebrity magazines and gossip columns, and you're no longer the bankable star. Where can you buy Xanax without someone taking a picture of you? Buy Xanax online. But Heath lost control, mixed his medications, took too much, and paid the price. Let that be a warning to you all. Stay alive by keeping control of your intake of Xanax and any other medications.

The one consolation in all this is that, even though Xanax was not able to keep poor Heath going, we still have the next Batman film to look forward to. By all accounts, Heath's performance as the Joker in the Dark Knight is well worth the price of entry. Although there's perhaps something inherently ironic about Xanaxman playing the Joker. Here's a character so completely over-the-top, so excessive in his nature with all that malicious glee bubbling over into destructive energy. Did Heath have to take Xanax to act the part of someone who so obviously doesn't take Xanax?