Before she'd reached double digits, Demi Lovato had a clear vision of her future. A child actress, who made her TV debut at six in Barney and Friends, Lovato was determined to emulate the careers of Shirley Temple and Amy Winehouse.
But by the age of 13, she had already become jaded. Signed on by Disney three years earlier, she had been cast alongside teen heartthrob Joe Jonas in Camp Rock, the singalong follow-up to the phenomenally successful High School Musical. With it, Lovato was thrust into the screens of nine million US households.
Even as she was making it Lovato worried she was following in the footsteps of troubled fellow Disney stars Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. "[During filming I thought] oh crap. In three years, that's going to be me," she said in a 2016 interview. A year later, she said she regretted her childhood career: "I wouldn't start that young if I could do it over again".
Lovato is now 25. On Wednesday, news broke of her being admitted to hospital after a suspected opioid overdose, a month after the singer released a single, Sober, that confirmed she had ended a six-year-stint of abstinence that had been prompted by the sometimes daily alcohol and cocaine consumption that had dogged her teens.
In recent years, Lovato has been praised for being a very modern star. She has won fans with a brazen honesty about not only her addiction, but her struggles with bulimia, self-harm and bipolar disorder. But Lovato's relapse has thrown yet another spotlight on the teen star machine and the pressures placed upon those thrust into Hollywood's spotlight so young. "Young people expect that being famous will make them loved by many and make them feel extremely good about themselves, but those wishes make them vulnerable," explains John Oates, a psychologist who has worked with safeguarding around children in the media.
Los Angeles is filled with tales of child actors who have battled crises while making the transition to adulthood, and the graduates of the Disney Channel are among the most prominent. Spears, who was a regular on the star-making TV show The Mickey Mouse Club, suffered a brutally public breakdown in 2007 that saw her shave her head and fend off photographers with an umbrella. Miley Cyrus, once the perky teen heroine Hannah Montana, underwent a controversial, highly sexualised image change. Disney film star Lindsay Lohan, meanwhile, was so frequently arrested for driving under the influence that the international press feared for her life, while a whole host of graduates, less-well known in the UK but stars in their home country, have found their troubled lives splashed across the tabloids. And while there are boys among them, the fact that the most prominent are women speaks volumes about the particular pressures foisted upon young female stars.
Could Hollywood be doing more to prevent the burn-out of these girls? Alison Roy, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, thinks so. "I think some questions need to be asked about roles of these professionals who maybe just paying lip service to psychological support. Are they able to say that a child isn't well enough, or well-supported enough, to perform? Are their individual needs ever assessed?"
Lovato's troubles, it should be pointed out, started before her career did. She was raised in a house blighted with eating disorders (as suffered by her professional cheerleader mother) and alcoholism (her father, a musician), and was bullied so brutally by her classmates she resorted to homeschooling.
But in pursuing her dreams, Lovato encountered an industry that only made her life less normal. Her acting career sat alongside a musical one via a complex web of music lessons and auditions: in becoming part of the Disney family, Lovato also signed a contract with Hollywood Records. Her musical talent was integral to her big break in Camp Rock, appearing as Jonas' girl-next-door love interest.
"All of a sudden she had to be this role model, and I don't think she was ready for that" Phil McIntyre, Demi Lovato's manager, said in her warts-and-all documentary, Simply Complicated. "She was living two lives. Here she was, squeaky clean on the Disney Channel... and just intense [scrutiny] around behavior. Once the camera stops rolling, she's living another life. She couldn't be a normal teenager." Lovato would later be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and suffered from unstable mental health throughout her early teens. She first used drugs at 17, while starring in her own show Sonny With a Chance.
It's this dichotomy – the need to project polished perfection while weathering the storms of adolescence – that is at the heart of the pressure heaped upon these teen idols, especially the girls, who have particular decrees about the way they should look. "From the time I was 11, it was, 'You're a pop star! That means you have to be blonde, and you have to have long hair, and you have to put on some glittery tight thing,'" a 22-year-old Cyrus told Marie Claire about starring in Hannah Montana. "Meanwhile, I'm this fragile little girl playing a 16-year-old in a wig and a ton of makeup. It was like Toddlers & Tiaras."
The confusion is compounded by the fact that while studios want these young stars to be glamorous, they want to keep them sexually neutral. Joe Jonas, the middle of the three Jonas Brothers who had their teenage musical career catapulted to international superstardom in six weeks after appearing on Hannah Montana, recalled the furore caused when nude photos of High School Musical lead Vanessa Hudgens appeared online. "We'd hear execs talking about it, and they would tell us that they were so proud of us for not making the same mistakes, which made us feel like we couldn't ever mess up," he wrote in a lengthy essay for New York Magazine in 2013. "We put incredible pressure on ourselves, the kind of pressure that no teenager should be under."
"It's a big shock when you have someone presented as a lovely Disney character," explains Roy. "All those darker feelings go underground."
Then there's the sheer physical exertions of the hours these teenagers are expected to work. In 2016, Lovato claimed that "we all were shooting shows and really overworking". A 2011 study in the journal of Child Development found that teenagers who work more than 20 hours per week are more likely to use drugs and alcohol. Jonas first tried marijuana at 17, at the urging of his co-stars Cyrus and Lovato.
When it comes to the issue of child stars, increasing scrutiny is paid to the studios and their duty of care. But while Disney recognises the demands placed on its teenage talent, it has always maintained that a child's welfare should be managed by other people. In 2012, Gary Marsh, the president of Disney Channels Worldwide, told The Hollywood Reporter: 'People know that we don't control who these individuals are, and we don't try to. It's the parents' job to do that.'
Oates disagrees. "Let's not blame parents," he enthuses. "Many parents are under-prepared for the challenges that face them. It takes a lot of knowledge of the industry, and child psychology, to know best how to mitigate what the risks are and how to deal with them."
With specific regards to Lovato, who had begun to talk about her addiction at the time, Marsh said: 'It's not fair... to lay that at the feet of the network that discovered her." But both Oates and Roy stress that studios should be engaging in better psychological screening to check the resilience and vulnerabilities of their young stars.
Disney have introduced measures to try and make things easier for new recruits. Since 2014, parents and children have been encouraged to go to monthly "life skills" classes which are taught by a paediatrician and an expert on child development and focus on emotional and physical wellbeing. There's also the half-day Talent 101 course that tells fledgling stars what to expect and how to deal with the wrangles of contemporary fame, such as their social media presence.
Somehow, though, it still doesn't seem enough: how can a monthly check-in balance out the rapid, and surreal, changes that take place when a child is put in the spotlight? It feels difficult to believe that Talent 101 have alleviated what Cyrus calls "some extreme damage in my psyche as an adult person."
At the time of writing, Lovato is making a recovery in the company of her family, with messages from fans flooding in and showing how much she has inspired them.
But while Lovato's honesty is to be commended, we mustn't forget that the demons she so publicly confronts have been harboured in an industry that routinely produces similarly damaged young women. Until that changes, other teenagers will be struggling with the confines of Hollywood's warped reality.
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