The resulting loss meant that an actor with outstanding potential couldn’t use his performance in The Dark Knight as a benchmark to elevate his career.

Ever since then, plenty of people have however decided to jump on the Heath Ledger bandwagon and literally mourned at the poor guy’s feet. Yes we did refer to him as that bummer cowboy, but so what? We had a vague idea of his previous career before his death unlike most people. Still, news continues to leak out about his apparent depressive nature even before The Dark Knight was filmed. Hold on tight for the most pointless thing you’ll read all day.

As soon as it was sadly announced that Heath Ledger had died, plenty of people decided that The Dark Knight came out, it would be deserving for him to win an Oscar in 2009. Consequently, plenty of people have launched pointless Facebook groups to try and make this happen.

But would this have happened if he had been alive and well? Probably not, we think, as we don’t see anyone screaming out for Slumdog Millionaire’s director Danny Boyle to grab his first Oscar for his recent effort. Probably because he’s alive and well and still making films.

The Golden Globes did see Heath clinch an award, which is all good and well, but with Oscar season coming round will he get an award based on performance, or the good old sympathy vote? Because The Golden Globes did so shit in the TV ratings, it would make sense to give him the award to make the network happy for the Oscars, but then again we don’t know how the bigwigs of the TV world think.

Despite passing away in 2008, we are now getting some stories from all the way back in  2005 about the poor guy. Are people that obsessed with the dead? It seems so as the producer of gay cowboy flick Brokeback Mountain has strangely decided to let us know how Heath was feeling during the film.

Do we care? No not particularly as it was during a time when he was just another actor amongst the thousands of people trying to make a name for themselves. Luckily for him, his pansy antics got everyone in Hollywood excited. However, it seems he wasn’t the happiest of bunnies back then when the film was being made. They say that Heath felt:

“Alone and isolated. I think it was his sense of not getting the kind of warm support.”

There you go. He felt a bit lonely and needed a friend. Will we be seeing multiple chain emails and Facebook groups started up now that this fact has been blown wide open to our attention?

Probably not, although maybe it’s true what they say about dying and becoming more famous afterwards as more people babble on about your legacy.

Or as in the case of Heath Ledger, film fans who want to look like they supported him from the very beginning of his shitastic debut in Clowning Around.

Go on, think about it…

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And those are precisely the two things that Heather Locklear has got. You'd think that Heather Locklear would be the happiest woman on the face of the earth, wouldn't you? Well you're wrong. In fact, there's a pretty good chance that Heather Locklear is one of the saddest.

Heather Locklear's just checked into an Arizona medical facility for psychological treatment as she's said to be suffering from anxiety and depression. And who can blame her – an actress of her calibre must be exhausted from taking on so many different personalities over the years. Sometimes Heather Locklear mustn't know if she's the woman who made one generic cameo appearance in Two And A Half Men, or the woman who made two generic cameo appearances in Ally McBeal. We feel for her, we really do.

You know which celebrity offspring we're most jealous of? Little Ava Elizabeth Sambora. Life must be so great for her – not only does she have a father who lulls her off to sleep at night by humming the guitar solo from Bad Medicine, but she knows that if she watches episodes of bad American sitcoms for long enough, her mother will inevitably pop up and do a rubbishy cameo before too long.

Sure, there are downsides to being the daughter of Richie Sambora and Heather Locklear – it must have been awkward when mummy and daddy divorced and daddy almost instantly ran off and shacked up with mummy's best friend Denise Richards, for example. Plus you'd never know when daddy would get drunk, lock you in his Hummer and recklessly career across several lanes of highway. And mummy might try and kill herself now and again. But our point still stands – Ava Elizabeth Sambora has the old 'drunk father/ mentally unbalanced mother' childhood that we always wanted and we hate her for it.

And it looks like Heather Locklear really is mentally unbalanced as well, because she's checked herself into a psychological hospital for treatment. Reuters reports:

"Heather has been dealing with anxiety and depression," Locklear's spokeswoman Cece Yorke said in a statement to Reuters. "She requested an in depth evaluation of her medication and entered into a medical facility for proper diagnosis and treatment." Yorke said the matter was confidential and no other statements would be released. 

It just goes to show that nobody is safe from depression, not even Heather Locklear – a woman who's experienced the giddy heights of starring in two episodes of Scrubs as well as two episodes of Boston Legal, and has managed to have sex with not only the bad-haired guitarist from Bon Jovi but also the bad-haired blonde midget from Just Shoot Me. How could that possibly be depressing, apart from the all the irregular soul-destroying bit-part work and the sex with unattractive men?

Still, we're not exactly surprised by any of this – if we heard that certain hecklerspray writers probably masturbated to pictures of us quite a lot in the 1980s, we'd currently be in an Arizona getting our brain looked at, too.

Today’s word: depressed. Adjective.

1. Sad, gloomy; dejected; downcast.

2. Being or measured below the standard or norm.

3. The reason you say you went to rehab, but everyone probably knows you’re a bit of a drunkard because there’s always loads of pictures of you stumbling out of clubs and parties pretty trashed.

Now, try to apply the correct definition to the following statement: Kirsten Dunst has publicly announced that her recent trip to rehab was because she was depressed.

And yes, the correct answer is ‘all of the above’.

Okay, okay. We’ve all had our share of good times poking fun at, well, everything to be perfectly honest, but right now we mean in regards to Kirsten Dunst. Not just about Kirsten Dunst being annoying and willowy and make you long for fingernails being dragged slowly across a chalkboard as opposed to enduring her movie roles, but also about catching the packed celebrity charter bus to rehab at Cirque Lodge in Utah back in February of this year.

But it’s time to stop calling Kirsten Drunk a dunst…or Kirsten Dunst a drunk, or whatever, okay? She didn’t go there because she was addicted alcohol or drugs, or anything. She went there because she was depressed. A sellout/source close to Kirsten had this to say to People:

“She does drink and she does have wild nights, but that was never the root of her issues. She couldn’t control her depression.”

Hey, we can’t say that we blame Kirsten. The woman did have to kiss perpetually semi-pubescent Tobey Maguire in those Spider-Man movies. Jeesh, that has us reaching for the Prozac just thinking about it. But let’s look at Kirsten’s personal statement on the issue as told to E! Online:

“I was struggling, and I had the opportunity to go somewhere and take care of myself. I was fortunate to have the resources to do it… Now that I’m feeling stronger, I was prepared to say something … Depression is pretty serious and should not be gossiped about.”

Not to be gossiped about. Whoops. Looks like we blew that one right nice, now didn’t we.

No. No they're not. They can't be because the woman who wrote the Harry Potter books, JK Rowling, has admitted that she's suffered from depression and battled suicidal thoughts before.

Of course, this all happened before Harry Potter got successful and JK Rowling got preposterously rich and stuff. Now any time JK Rowling gets a bit sad she'll go to a poor person's house, buy their furniture and pets for a tenner and set it all on fire in front of them until she's happy again. Works every time.

You'd think that famous people would be the happiest people on Earth, wouldn't you? They have fame, success, power, wealth, access to top-notch cosmetic surgeons, nice hair, expensive shoes, children with invented names, illogical religious beliefs and a constant access to any number of willing sexual partners. But sometimes that isn't the case, because a lot of celebrities have tried to kill themselves in the past.

It's true – Halle Berry tried to kill herself and Tom Jones tried to kill himself and Owen Wilson tried to kill himself. That's literally every celebrity in the world. Admittedly, aside from Owen Wilson – who was found in his home with blood oozing from his slashed wrists – neither of the other two actually attempted suicide, but just entertained the thought of it so they could use the experience in an anecdote years later to show how successful they've subsequently become, but it still sort of counts.

It must do, because Harry Potter creator JK Rowling has just done that exact thing. In an interview with a student magazine, JK Rowling announced that there was this time once that she got a little bit miserable:

"The thing that made me go for help was probably my daughter. She was something that earthed me, grounded me, and I thought, this isn't right, this can't be right, she cannot grow up with me in this state. We're talking suicidal thoughts here, we're not talking "I'm a little bit miserable"… I have never been remotely ashamed of having been depressed. Never. What's to be ashamed of? I went through a really rough time and I am quite proud that I got out of that."

In the end, JK Rowling went and had some cognitive behavioural therapy to snap her out of it, and it worked. Now JK Rowling is a beacon of inspiration for all the other suicidal depressives in the world – she's living proof that all it takes to get out of a suicidal funk is a guilt-making baby, some therapy and the ability to write the most successful childrens' book franchise in history and become richer than the Queen out of it. Anyone can do it.

But why has JK Rowling decided to speak out about her depression now? Did the topic come up naturally in the conversation? Is this a sneaky first step towards JK Rowling writing trashy self-help books? Or is it part of JK Rowling's ongoing tactic of discussing things that have happened to her in the past to help her think up something to come after Harry Potter? We think it might be.

JK Rowling has already visited her old house and now she's recounting her almost-suicide. But surely that's it now – surely JK Rowling can't go on dredging up past memories to hold off writing a Harry Potter follow-up, can she? Because, honestly, it's just a matter of time before JK Rowling gives an explosive interview about The Time I Woke Up And Thought It Was Thursday But It Was Actually Wednesday, and we don't know how we'd cope with that.

Read more:

JK Rowling: I've thought about suicide – Now