Despite being richer today compared with 1950, we are much unhappier. A 25-year- old is three to 10 times more likely to be depressed. Diana's depression was a famous fact about her; she was treated with therapy and Prozac. I do not think that for the most affected that "Diana" was any more real than Vera Duckworth from ITV's Coronation Street. But it may also suggest that the boundaries between reality and fantasy are becoming seriously blurred.The death of a star in a soap opera or in a feature film may, in extremis, cause us to cry but we know it is a fiction and we do not go into mourning. The real death of the actor who played that part might trigger widespread mourning-like symptoms (James Dean, River Phoenix).But no plot development in the virtual-media world has led to anything like this reaction. Unlike in a real relationship, this person was never there in the flesh and she had no opportunity to communicate with them personally.That this is possible is a tribute to the effectiveness and skill of modern media in persuading us to suspend our disbelief - to experience a representation of a person as so real that we feel the same way about them as people with whom we have actually communicated.
But to become convinced that they have lost a friend or relative seems out of place.The starting point must be that they are emotionally attached to "Diana": they feel affection and concern for her. But since they have never met this woman it is a one-way relationship with a set of images and words that they have experienced on television and in print. We use our imaginations to paint in the details of what it would be like to be feeling in love, pleasantly watered and fed at the Ritz one moment, and smashing into a wall at 120 mph the next.Of course she was a woman of remarkable glamour and seems to have had an unusual capacity to emotionally touch those she did meet.But be this as it may, virtually all the people queuing to write in the books of remembrance or to place flowers at venues all over the country have never met her.Feelings of shock and regret that she should no longer be with us and sympathy for her relatives would be appropriate. It is also true that we have been forced by endlessly repeated pictures and words to relive it. Each morning he wakes and then he remembers, with a dreadful sinking feeling and perhaps with a cry of rage: she is no more I do not believe it is like that for the rest of us. But if "The Nation Mourns" is an incorrect headline, it is true to say that something very extreme is going on at the moment which does require explaining.The unexpectedness and violence of the death made it more shocking.
Members of the public are constantly telling TV reporters and journalists that the death feels to them "exactly like when a relative dies" but that is simply not accurate. The way Prince William feels today is of a different order of magnitude. It usually lasts about a year and is of an intensity and duration that far exceeds what most of us feel about her death. And though you diedAn eager girl again, dressed for the ball,"God Save The Queen" is what the radio played.Carol Rumens,3.9.97. The nation is not in mourning for Diana.
