Michael Jackson’s sudden death by cardiac arrest is less shocking than the slow, but steady demise of his soul, which turned him into a music machine fueled by addictions to drugs, money, possessions, fame and plastic surgery.  As my friend and fellow journalist Josh Resnek has remarked, Jackson’s body died at 50; the rest of him died much younger.

Jackson’s life story is a cautionary tale about what happens when a child is deprived of his core self.  That deprivation likely stemmed from what Jackson himself described as the physical and psychological brutality of his father Joe, who reportedly whipped him and verbally abused him and monetized his talents from age 10 through endless rehearsals and performances of The Jackson 5.  Now Joe is planning a big, public funeral for his twice-dead son, keeping him on the stage even after he is gone from this earth.

Jackson’s first, long, tortuous death was a gradual stopping of his metaphorical heart—the heart of a boy harnessed to a father’s tyrannical plans to enslave him.  It left him uncertain whether anything at all was authentic about him, whether there was anything whatsoever he could embrace as the truth. 

He was forever ambivalent about his race, bleaching or otherwise altering his skin tone to appear Caucasian. 

He was forever ambivalent about his facial structure, undergoing plastic surgeries until his nose seemed in danger of falling off his face, his chin became a caricature of the kind with a cleft he must have admired on other people’s faces, and his jaw line became a haunting skeletal representation of just how dead he really was inside.

He seemed forever ambivalent about his gender, because he could not claim even that as his own, morphing from tough guy to girl in appearance and garb. 

He seemed ambivalent about his age, living in an amusement park he built, with zoo animals on display.  Could he have actually missed the fact that he was a caged animal himself, thrilling crowds with his exotic movements and appearance? 

He may have been ambivalent or twisted about what pleased him sexually, given his habit of inviting young boys into his bed and his history of having paid out $20 million to settle a child sexual molestation suit.

He staged sham marriages and “fathered” children who appeared wearing carnival masks in public—all part of the show.  He dangled his baby boy over a railing for his fans, in what may have been the starkest representation of how he felt his own life had ended shortly after birth. 

The distance between a man’s mind and his core self — his soul — is the breeding place for anxiety and depression.  And Jackson apparently tried to contain those unwieldy emotions in the predictable ways — drugging himself by acquiring possessions and trying to shut up the long-dying person inside him with opiates and tranquilizers.  Then the truth asserted itself in the final way it sometimes does.  It stopped his heart suddenly, when, for all intents and purposes, it had not been beating (not for real) for decades.

For months, Becca Beushausen, a 26-year-old woman from Mokena, Ill., was known on her blog only as “B” or “April’s Mom.”  She had become the darling of those who defend the unborn’s right to life by blogging about her commitment to give birth to a child with a rare disorder called holoprosencephaly, a condition that would cause her baby girl to be born with malformations of her brain and face that would ultimately prove fatal. 

Beushausen talked about her Christian faith and devotion to God.  She posted photographs of herself and described her agony and resolve in great detail. 

She hit a nerve.  There was an outpouring of empathy for her.  Hundreds of thousands of readers logged on to her site, many offering the prayers she requested, then sending gifts and donations to the address she posted.

The trouble started when Beushausen posted a photo of the ill-fated baby, which turned out to be a doll made by Reborn Dolls.  That’s when her story started to unravel.  The entire tale, it seemed, was untrue — a terrible hoax that had played upon the sympathies and generosity of spirit of others.  There was no Baby April.  There was no holoprosencephaly.  There was no commitment to bring a damaged child into the world.

Some would say that there is nothing to Becca Beushausen, in fact, other than greed and a failure to recognize the pain people experience when their feelings are manipulated.  Yet I promise you that, with all the lies she has told, there’s still truth in Becca’s blog.

As a psychiatrist, here’s what I read:  A young woman feels disconnected from many things in her life, but not entirely from her suffering, which is very real and which she has little insight into.  Her suffering probably includes having been told some big lies herself, which makes her vulnerable to playing very loose with facts.  It probably also includes traumas that would be hard to look at—as hard as, say, a baby’s malformed face.   These are traumas that call for extraordinary empathy from others.  The evidence of that empathy are not only the prayers offered by strangers, but the gifts sent by them.  Accepting these gifts may seem to be petty theft, but they are the young woman’s way of trying to balance the books on the poverty she feels in her soul and pay herself restitution for things stolen from her as a girl—unspeakable things lost when she was as defenseless as a baby besieged by an all-powerful disease.

The way I read it and see it and will write it here is that Becca Beushausen is herself the ailing, struggling baby she named April.  A disorder that won’t show up on a CT scan or MRI has hold of her, and it has deprived her of breathing easy in life, of living an existence based in truth, of respecting herself and others. 

Becca is due all the empathy that were bestowed upon her and April (but, of course, none of the material gifts).

If you doubt me, just listen to Becca herself, in a recent posting:

“The #1 question I have been asked in the last few days is what would I tell people online who followed my story, who are now upset to find it is not true – The simplest and most honest way that I can answer why I started lying (even prior to opening my blog) and started my blog is that I am struggling with my life.  I have been dealing with unresolved pain that weighs heavy on my heart and which I have been unable to handle alone.”

Send Becca your prayers.  I’m sure she needs them more than ever.  Her website is: http://littleoneapril.blogspot.com/

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s Web site at livingthetruth.com.

David Carradine’s naked body was found hanging in a Bangkok, Thailand hotel room last Thursday morning, setting in motion a debate about whether the star of the feature film “Kill Bill” and the long-running television series “Kung Fu” (1972-1975) committed suicide, accidently died while attempting to stimulate himself through autoerotic asphyxia or was murdered.

While that debate rages on, a Thai newspaper called Thai Rath has published forensic photos of Carradine’s naked corpse.  His ex-wife Marina Anderson has also seen fit to tell the New York Post of Carradine’s “deviant sexual behavior.”

Here we are at the flipside of losing our inner selves to YouTube and Facebook and Twitter.  Too many of us suddenly all think we’re celebrities, but we also think that real celebrities are inhuman, celluloid creatures without the right to the privacy or decency befitting other human beings.  Some in society actually seem to think that the fact that actors make a living by … well … acting means that they have sold their souls to us and that we can devour them like movie popcorn.  That’s why the paparazzi thinks they have license to stalk stars as though they are alien creatures or zoo animals on the loose.  And it’s why we feel free to peek through windows into David Carradine’s most private acts and final moments. 

David Carradine was a person, before he was ever an actor.  What he signed up for was to share his gift and his craft with those who might enjoy it.  I’m one of those people.  Kung Fu was part of my childhood.  Something about Carradine’s quiet intensity, combined with the idea that he could not leave his training at the monastery until he could focus enough to snatch a pebble from his teacher’s open hand, got my attention and stayed with me all this time. 

But the fact that I was a young fan of Carradine doesn’t make me think I have the inherent right to look at naked photos of his dead body or get the inside scoop from his disgruntled ex-wife about what he liked to do in bed.  It would make me feel like a trespasser in his private life.  It would make me worry about doing harm to those who loved Carradine, in real life. 

That’s the trouble, though.  We don’t think of actors as real, anymore.  We don’t think of politicians as genuine, anymore.  We don’t think of sports stars as dedicated athletes, anymore.  We don’t think of the economy as a miraculous engine that runs only on the truth, anymore.  Because, in the end, too many of us don’t think enough of our real selves, anymore.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s Web site at livingthetruth.com.

Millions of Americans watch the hit reality TV series “Jon & Kate Plus 8” on TLC. 

They are now following Katie Irene Gosselin and Jonathan Keith Gosselin into a fifth season of parenting their eight children — fraternal twin girls and a set of fraternal sextuplets.

The show is taped in the Gosselin home — the “set” includes permanent light fixtures.

Lately, the drama has focused on whether Jon did or did not cheat on Kate with either of two women spotted with him over Memorial Day weekend and, more recently, at a mall.  He insists the women are the wife and daughter of plastic surgeon Dr. Larry Glassman who performed Kate’s tummy tuck surgery.

I don’t really care whether Jon has been faithful to Kate or not.  My question about him and his wife is about how they can justify turning  their kids’ lives into entertainment, with unknown, possibly severe, psychological fallout.

No one knows the precise psychological impact of having parents who are “acting” like parents for the cameras or having producers around who are hoping for high drama, but the impact could be significant and negative.  Life has to stay interesting to keep viewers around, after all. Decisions about how to handle family crises, including the question of whether to stay a couple at all, might well be colored by  worries about how it all will play out on TV.

Kate Gosselin recently went on a vacation with her eight kids to North Carolina. They were accompanied by body guards and camera crews.

This is like having a stage mother (and father) on steroids.  Because in this case, she’s on stage, too.  How does one of the children decide to drop out of the series?  If he or she did, would that child risk losing parental attention and love?  Who has the moral right to decide that another human being’s life story will be played for television audiences?

Movie stars and politicians often have enough good sense to understand — as good parents — that they need to protect their children from the glare of bright lights and media exposure.  They understand that their own notoriety shouldn’t be a ball-and-chain for their kids.  They don’t want their sons and daughters defined by them.  They want them to have their own lives — for real.

I hope that each and every one of the Gosselin children grows up to be happy and healthy. But if they should end up depressed or on drugs, I hope they find therapists who will explore whether part of their pain is a feeling that their lives were stolen from them, whether they were put on display like zoo animals under glass, all for fame and profit.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s Web site at livingthetruth.com.

On May 21, 2009, Linda Fleming, a woman with terminal pancreatic cancer, took a fatal overdose of medications prescribed by her physician to end her life.  She thus became the first person to commit suicide under the “Death with Dignity” law that passed the state legislature November 4, 2008 and took effect during March.

The law in Washington State is modeled after one that has been on the books in Oregon since 1997.  About 400 people have ended their lives through physician-assisted suicide in that state.

Under the assisted suicide law in Washington, a patient who is terminally ill and legally competent and who two physicians agree has only 6-months to live, can request lethal medication.  The request needs to be made verbally on two occasions, 15 days apart, followed by a written request witnessed by two people.  The medication is dispensed by a pharmacy.  Patients take the medication themselves, rather than having a doctor administer it to them.

I’ve counseled people battling fatal illnesses.  I’ve watched a friend struggle against cancer.  I’ve told family members in ICUs and ERs that their loved ones have died.  So I know how much pain can come at the end of life, when an illness takes hold. 

I understand where the desire for a law like Washington’s comes from.  It’s a tribute to human empathy that lawmakers resonated with the suffering of terminally ill patients enough to pass it.  But I wouldn’t have voted for it myself. 

Alleviating the suffering of 400 or so patients since 1997 in Oregon has carried a pretty high price tag.  It has opened the door to thinking of the medical profession not entirely as one devoted to prolonging life, but as one that is also empowered to help end lives.  And this can leave patients feeling as though they ought to consider suicide when they are given terminal diagnoses.  They ought to be reasonable, not just with what they are willing to go through, but with what they put their families and friends through.  They ought not expend health care resources needlessly in their final months.  Their clinicians aren’t only thinking about what treatment options to provide, after all.  They’re thinking about other patients who have elected to forego treatment and hasten death. 

I fear the law can also take away some of the motivation of doctors to “pull a rabbit out of a hat” and save a patient’s life.  There’s a reason you wouldn’t want soldiers going into battle who are also trained in the etiquette of surrender.  You’d worry it might unconsciously take away their edge, chip away a little bit at their determination to take that hill.

At present, the criteria which must be met under the Death with Dignity Law sound rational.  But laws are not static entities.  Now that the door to physician assisted suicide is open, the Death with Dignity law could be amended in the future, perhaps to include those who might not die for twelve months, or longer.  How about those who suffer unbearably from medical conditions that will only worsen over the years?  If we are willing to use the medical profession to help end the lives of those who have but six months to live, how about those who become quadriplegic and say they cannot bear it?

It is psychologically and spiritually perilous to do harm to the magnificent will to live that keeps us fighting for another day.  And it is no less dangerous to blur the mandate of physicians to try to win that fight, however daunting, however seemingly futile.  The physician’s white coat has meaning—to doctors and their patients.  It must remain a bright beacon of the healing powers of the profession, not a flag of surrender to the inevitable.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s Web site at livingthetruth.com.

Twitter, for anyone left on the planet who doesn’t know, is a free social network on which users update their “followers” about where they are, what they’re doing or what they think — up to the minute.  Essentially, it is a way to shotgun micro-blogs about your life (called tweets) to an audience of email pals you gather.  Ashton Kutcher has over 1,000,000 people following his posts.  I think my babysitter has about 100.

Twitter sounds like fun.  It seems pretty harmless.  And it’s really catching on, with over 50 million monthly visitors and a growth rate far surpassing 1000 percent per year.

There’s something troubling about Twitter psychologically, though.  You could say the same for Facebook or MySpace and YouTube, but Twitter is potentially bigger trouble than any of the others.  That’s because it can turn people into instant, mini-reality show versions of themselves — into entertainers, removed a little bit or a whole lot from their real feelings, genuine thoughts and true connections to others.

See, sending out tweets to “followers” isn’t a lot different than reporting your life as though you’re your own member of the paparazzi.  It presumes that people care what you’re up to, which may not be entirely true and can be the growing place for narcissism.  Narcissism, by the way, is unreasonable self-love, and it’s reaching epidemic proportions in this country.  Young people think the world of themselves, even as their performance academically and in many other arenas declines.

Reporting on your own life story can also make you tend toward the dramatic in your daily existence.  After all, who wants to send out boring tweets?  You need to be reporting on adventure, romance, and, above all, conflict.  As any decent screenwriter will tell you, people tune out if there’s no conflict.  But when did we decide that being a human being, even an interesting human being, meant being “watchable” enough for people to “tune into” your broadcasts? 

We didn’t decide any such thing.  The yielding of humanity to technology, the bleeding of our true selves into fake profiles we manufacture for semi-public digestion has been a largely unconscious slippery slope.  Technology has pushed us there.  Media has pushed us there.  Celebrities hell-bent on making us worship them have pushed us there.  But more than anything, our own discomfort with being real people, our own anxieties about whether we really matter, doubts about whether we are lovable and fear of our own mortality has pushed us there.

Recently, surgeons have gotten into the Twitter game.  They are broadcasting complex surgeries with constant tweets written up by OR staff so families or the general public can get up-to-the-minute reports about kidney transplants and the like.  Doctors even do little PR tours about breaking new ground with their twittering.  Well, guess what?  I don’t want my doctor playing media darling while he or she is working inside my body.  And I don’t need nurses hoping to be mentioned on a tweet.  I want them focused on reality, on life and death, on me.

Here’s the really scary part.  Twitter isn’t the end of the self-broadcasting phenomenon.  There will be son of Twitter.  And we will be that much further along the slippery slope to being actors in our own life stories, devoid of anything real, looking only for drama.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s Web site at livingthetruth.com.

When Drew Peterson was brought into court on charges that he murdered his third wife Kathleen Savio, he was in a good mood.  He yelled jokes to reporters about how “spiffy” his red prison jumpsuit was and called his shackles “bling.” 

Peterson is, of course, also a suspect in the 2007 disappearance of Stacy Peterson, his fourth wife.  He insists he is an innocent man.

Think of how you’d respond to being dragged into court on murder charges, especially if you were wrongly accused.  You might be terrified or confused or enraged at the injustice of your plight, but you wouldn’t be all smiles, spewing one-liners.

So how can Drew Peterson do it?

To have any hope of understanding Drew Peterson, one first has to understand human empathy.   Empathy is the ability to resonate with the feelings of others to such an extent that one actually experiences some of their joy or grief or anxiety.  It is a remarkable and inexplicable quality that we too often take for granted.  The fact that a friend can be brought to tears by a loss of yours, that you can intuit and share the worries or hopes or pride of your partner in life, or that the hunger of children thousands of miles away could spur you to action on their behalf is a tribute to this miraculous force.

Empathy does even more, though.  It helps us contain our anger and our destructive impulses, because we can imagine how it might feel to be the object of that rage.  It also helps us gauge what is appropriate language and behavior in various situations, again because we can imagine how others are likely to respond to us.  We can put ourselves in the shoes of our friends or neighbors or loved ones. 

I believe empathy is an essential ingredient in experiencing guilt, as well.  If you can’t imagine the injuries you may have done another person—can’t feel their pain in any measure—then you aren’t likely to worry over any harm you’ve done them.  The absence of empathy is the growing place for antisocial and narcissistic traits that set a person adrift from the interpersonal ties and sense of personal responsibility that bind the rest of us.

Drew Peterson may be largely devoid of empathy.  That’s why he just doesn’t get the fact that lobbing jokes to reporters while being dragged into court on charges he murdered a young woman is bizarre and macabre.  It’s why he believed he’d come across as credible on television during the media tour he orchestrated after the disappearance of Stacy Peterson.  It’s why he probably is confident a jury will acquit him (which, of course, it could).  Peterson may not be able to put himself in the place of others—at all.

One of the most toxic manifestations of having no empathy, of course, is that it leaves those without it free to inflict suffering on others.  There’s no wincing at causing them pain, even death.  In the forest of pure narcissistic and antisocial traits that grow in soil without roots of empathy, only self-preservation and one’s own needs matter.  No one and nothing else really does.

If Drew Peterson killed Kathleen Savio or is responsible for the disappearance of Stacy Peterson or both, he isn’t worried about any of that.  He’s busy with the opportunity to showcase what he believes is his extraordinary charm and intelligence and wit.  And he thinks you and I and every reporter and every judge and every juror will be mesmerized.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s Web site at livingthetruth.com.

Dawn Drexel, the mother of missing teen Brittanee Drexel, told WHEC News 10 in Rochester, N.Y. that she believes her daughter may have been kidnapped or may not be alive.

Brittanee, 17, has been missing since April 25 when she went to Myrtle Beach, S.C., for spring break.

Brittanee’s mother is no longer a stranger to the darkest possible chapter in a parent’s life story: the feared or actual loss of a child.

I have worked with several parents who have survived their own children. I have struggled with them against tides of grief that seem never to recede, but simply to become more expected, so they lose the power to sweep these bereaved mothers and fathers off their feet.

Losing a child lays bare the miraculous connections that can hold families together through thick and thin. No matter how contentious the relationships mothers and fathers may have with their children, the bond between them can’t be reproduced or entirely obliterated. At the ages of 50 and 60 (and older), my patients still want to make sense of the way they related to their parents in childhood, young adulthood and beyond. They are still sons and daughters, even if they have lost their parents.

So Dawn Drexel, brave enough to speak to the media at an unspeakable moment, may wander tonight into Brittanee’s room. Maybe she’ll lie down on her daughter’s bed, maybe she’ll let herself smell her daughter’s pillow. She may think she hears Brittanee’s footsteps or voice or her car pulling into the driveway. That’s no surprise when we consider the sounds of togetherness that come to play like music in the backgrounds of our daily lives, sounds that we stop hearing after a while, maybe because we take them for granted, maybe because no parent’s heart could maintain its rhythm while bearing full witness to the unspeakable, unfathomable beauty of one’s own child. We don’t hear a tenth of what we could, if we thought the music might end.

For those of you reading these words  — the lucky parents out there with children still close enough to hug, I hope you’ll give it a try tonight. Sit for a few minutes and listen to the sounds of your children in the house: their footsteps, their fingers clicking keys on a computer, the opening and closing of their closet doors, their voices on the phone and their breathing as they sleep. Let yourself marvel at the fact that your life has spawned another life and that you have the continuing, rare and wonderful opportunity to shape not only your existence, but that of another human being. Let yourself smile at the thought of their favorite toys (if they’re still young enough), their favorite clothes, the posters on their walls, their best friends, the sports they’ve come to enjoy, the hopes and dreams they’ve embraced.

Stay silent a minute longer. Then close your eyes, think about Dawn Drexel and her missing daughter Brittanee and pray for them both.

I’m going to do that right now. My children are asleep, a few dozen feet away from me. I am a lucky man and I know it.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s website at livingthetruth.com.

Cases of swine flu, or H1N1, are climbing and spreading to more states.  At least 141 people in the U.S. have been infected, and one Mexican boy visiting Texas has died.  Many more cases will be diagnosed—likely many thousands—before the spread of the illness ebbs.  Public health officials and journalists warn of a pandemic, an epidemic of infectious disease that sweeps across a large geographic area, such as a continent, or around the whole world.
 
The toll of this new flu may turn out to be disastrous, but there’s no current evidence that a calamity is brewing.  Thus far, every American who has contracted the illness has survived.  Even if there turns out to be 250,000 cases this year, the number will still be dwarfed by the toll of diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, depression and alcoholism on our population.
 
What the 141 cases of H1N1 flu have already proven, however, is how vulnerable we are to panic.  Americans are on edge, uncertain about the economy and uncertain about the direction our President is leading us.  Ultimately, for all but those with the steadiest of nerves and most solid sense of self, we are a nation collectively experiencing a sense of impending doom—one of the hallmarks of panic disorder.  H1N1 may or may not cause serious physical suffering for our population, but its emergence will cause serious psychological suffering for a nation already traumatized by deep doubts about whether the solutions to our collective problems reside in bailouts, embracing dictators and apologizing for our national shortcomings.
 
 Some might say that connecting our reaction to H1N1 flu to the economic crisis and cultural crisis at hand is too great a leap, that we are as steady on our feet emotionally as a population as ever.  I don’t think so.  I’ve been at my work 16 years, seeing adults and adolescents facing every imaginable twist and turn of fate.  Never before I have seen as many individuals who feel disempowered, unable to mount any resistance (words intentionally chosen) to the stressors impacting them.
 
Our psychological resistance to trauma of any kind is down right now.  That’s one reason that Air Force One flying low near Ground Zero was such a grand faux pax:  It re-traumatized thousands of people who don’t have emotional bandwidth to spare.  It’s even possible that our psychological stress could reduce our resistance to physical illnesses, including H1N1.
 
 It’s time for a real public health initiative, rolled out through private health care providers and, perhaps, community health educators, that targets two certain epidemics already sweeping the nation:  anxiety and depression.  They may not be spread by coughing and sneezing, but they have the capacity to paralyze us emotionally and cost our nation dearly.

Dr. Keith Ablow is a psychiatry correspondent for FOX News Channel and a New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, “Living the Truth: Transform Your Life through the Power of Insight and Honesty” has launched a new self-help movement. Check out Dr. Ablow’s website at livingthetruth.com.