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Using the threatened yet ultimately reconfirmed celebrity status of pop singer and mental health advocate Demi Lovato as a case study, this article analyzes how celebrity health narratives reflect and produce a neoliberal ideology of individuality in the context of mental health care. It is argued that Lovato has successfully rebranded herself as the embodiment of achievement, self-improvement and confidence by embracing her diagnosis with bipolar disorder and other mental health struggles. Furthermore, the article demonstrates how her celebrity health narrative has been repackaged and reproduced by the merchandizing industry, providing general lifestyle advice about the value of ongoing self-improvement. This convergence between the 'sickscape' of mental illness and celebrity culture can be understood as a 'celebritization of self-care', which reproduces a hyper-individualized, neoliberal and distinctly gendered ideology of meritocracy, and presents all forms of achievement, including recovery from mental illness, as the result of competitive individualism.

In his Harvard lectures of 1969-1970, collected in Sincerity and Authenticity, the American critic Lionel Trillling (1971) at one point states, somewhat surprisingly: 'Irony is one of those words, like love, which are best not talked about if they are to retain any force of meaningother such words are sincerity and authenticity' (p. 120). It is a puzzling remark that opens up a world of double layers and aporias. At first glance, it is tempting to assume that the statement itself must be understood as ironic: given the scope and ambition of Trilling's book, it is highly unlikely that the author sincerely believes that his extensive reflections on sincerity and authenticity would not have elucidated the force of the meaning of these words. Yet if Trilling's claim is indeed insincere, and if his irony thus reveals a rift between the performance of his public (lecturing) self and the inner beliefs of his 'true' self, then he proves his own point. After all, if his sincerity and authenticity are to be doubted (and echoing Sartre, Trilling even affirms that 'we [are] all inauthentic' [1971., p. 102]), surely his own words on these topics must be without any force of meaning. Trilling's self-contradictory remark does make two things clear, however. First, Trilling convincingly demonstrates how difficult it is to talk about sincerity and authenticity, as analytic reflection upon them requires a self-awareness and studiousness that seem to be deeply at odds with those very same values. Second, Trilling's comments foreground the importance of these values for the public performance and perception of the self: it only takes a phrase considered to be ironic, or a moment of perceived self-doubt, for us to question the sincerity of one's words or the authenticity of one's persona. It is but a small step from Trilling's scholarly reflections in Sincerity and Authenticity on Shakespeare, Goethe, Marx, Hegel, Sartre and others to the contemporary domain of celebrity studies. After all, if in contemporary western societies the 'true star' is valued as 'the epitome' of 'sincerity and authenticity', whilst the mass media projecting the star are simultaneously 'construed as the very antithesis' (ibid.) of those qualities, as Richard Dyer (1991, p. 139) has famously suggested; then, celebrity culture can be understood as an endless quest for the sincere and the authentic. It is a culture that revolves aroundto paraphrase Trillingtalking about these values, but also a culture of make-believe, artificiality and image control, in which it is profoundly challenging to determine what truly is sincere or authentic. According to Dyer (2004), stardom is shaped by 'a rhetoric of sincerity or authenticity, two qualities greatly prized in stars because they guarantee, respectively, that the star really means what he or she says, and that the star really is what she or he appears to be'

UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository)Narratives of Undiagnosability Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Life-Writing and the Indeterminacy of Illness Memoirs Franssen, G.

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