A couple of day ago, Walter Koenig's son.
Today, Marie Osmond's adopted son.
Two weeks ago, designer Alexander McQueen.
Dead by their own hands.
I know depression is an illness.
I know if you add booze and drugs to a vulnerable character you are asking for it.
But there is something else wrong here, isn't there?
I know whales beach themselves for reasons we don't understand. But we cannot blame the deaths of young men on electromagnetic short circuits in the earth's crust.
I know Black Widows kill their mate and I have seen enough nature programmes to know that dispensing a killer sting can be a mutually fatal type of justice or that an act of copulation may turn out to be an act of euthanasia.
But humans surely have the monopoly on these most pointless acts of self sacrifice.
Is it to do with fame, society, money?
Is it lack of fulfilment, purpose, giving, engaging?
Is there neglect from missed opportunities?
Accidental neglect and not total of course, but is there an aspect of it?
Surely we can agree, whatever it was they needed, they didn't get.
And anyone with entry level psychobabble know that things work best when we get what we need from life rather than what we (think we) want.
Surely we can agree that any couple you know has a different life when the front door closes to when you see them? Celebrity or no. Look at the domestic abuse or just the divorce figures if you want a concrete clue.
Is there something invisible to the outside world that was overlooked?
Maybe it was impossible to bridge that gap.
And maybe it wasn't.
Maybe there was something that could have been done. Not to make the underlying problem evaporate but to reclaim some level of stability.
It's hard to believe in something intangible. And I would guess that just as many people who have the brain aberration that make them believe in gods would find this too.
How can depression be an illness rather than a collection of events? It doesn't even show up on a CT scan so how can it really exist?
It does exist of course. We just might need a scanner a million times more sensitive.
Until then, we need to borrow a little blind faith from the puff-of-smoke-on-a-cloud brigade and drink in a little well-accepted medical knowledge.
Maybe entertainers are prone because they lower their resilience so regularly. Actors drop their shields for our entertainment and we accept their sacrifice whatever the cost.
How often do you hear them go on about applying the method of 'sense memory'? They practice identifying with their darkest times, so they can find them easily when the director says "Action".
If you are the wrong type of character, this is a recipe for disaster. But there is no psych evaluation for RADA. The very thing the army might reject may be the same thing that makes you the world's greatest actor.
You become what you rehearse so when you make yourself feel that way so regularly those feelings surface to a place of dangerous accessibility. And they can bleed through when you don't expect. They can appear when they are not useful and not just six times a week plus matinees.
Such free reign for your emotions may not be a good thing in ordinary life. Murder defences have rested on less. And it is likely that for the sensitive people we are talking about, suicide is a million times easier than murder.
Our survival is based on our filters. Cut them and we leak through.
And if your version of reality faces the "real" world outside without those filters in pretty good nick, your version will lose.
You will lose yourself.
The game's up.
You have to get tough to survive.
But you don't have to get tough with the vulnerable people. They are in a bad enough state already. You have to help them get tough. It is a totally different set of skills.
Maybe we can reset this vulnerability and upgrade their barriers. There is an entire discipline of cognitive therapy devoted to this, though doubtless they would phrase it differently.
I know depression is an illness.
But a prescription of antidepressants from a brief appointment does not absolve everyone around them from offering their own type of cure - in the words of Andrew Koenig's father "Extend a hand".
Together these improvised approaches may get lucky and cement a wall of sufficient resilience to block the demons when the powers of darkness rise.
