When Hollywood stars and beauty queens check into rehab to redeem themselves, do they set a good example, or are they helping to glorify bad behaviour by making it all look a little too easy?

"The reality is that when famous people do anything it carries the risk of glorifying behaviour," says Dr. David Goldbloom, senior medical advisor, education and public affairs at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

"I think the other risk is that when people behave badly that issues like substance abuse and mental illness get wholly identified as the cause of the behaviour," Goldbloom says. "Therefore the slate is wiped clean, with instant admission to rehab, so that runs the risk of generating the risk of cynicism."

On the plus side, celebrities who enter rehab are helping to destigmatize the shame associated with the recovery process, he said.

But Goldbloom, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, advises impressionable star-watchers to take with a grain of salt, the stories of wild-eyed nightclub- and rehab-hopping stars.

"It's not the real world and the same way most of us don't look like beautiful people, most of us don't act like beautiful people -- at least as their lives are depicted in the tabloids," Goldbloom said.

This year, there was plenty of fodder for the gossip-hungry tabloids -- girls gone wild. Indeed, 2006, may well be remembered as the year Hollywood went unhinged.

The year Hollywood went unhinged

The public watched with a combination of awe and horror as Britney Spears became the latest celeb to flash her private parts (oops!) again and again.

The newly single Spears was photographed sans skivvies getting in and out of limousines as she hit the nightclub circuit alongside fellow underwear-challenged gal pal Paris Hilton.

Though her antics drew scorn, Spears was nevertheless the most popular Yahoo search topic for the fifth time in six years.

Hilton also dominated her fair share of headlines this year. She famously told the media earlier this year she didn't like the taste of alcohol so she rarely drank. Within weeks, she had been arrested and later charged with misdemeanour drunken driving.

Not to be outdone by Hilton, Nicole Richie was also arrested for investigation of driving under the influence after her car was spotted heading down the wrong side of the freeway, while she was high on marijuana and prescription painkiller Vicodin.

Meanwhile Hilton's on-again, off-again friend Lindsay Lohan was not lost in the headline shuffle.

The 20-year-old actress said earlier this month that she has been attending Alcoholics Anonymous for a year. In the same breath, she admitted she had been sober just the last seven days.

It's not just the girls. Mel Gibson, Robin Williams and Keith Urban also made headlines for rehab stints, and comedian Michael Richards has begun psychiatric to learn how to manage his anger, the fallout from his racist rant at a comedy club. But the girls are the ones really shocking us.

Most recently, a teary-eyed Tara Conner thanked Donald Trump profusely for letting her keep her Miss USA crown after being discovered drinking underage before turning 21. Sure enough, she too is entering rehab.

But most civilians don't have the same easy access to rehabilitation centres and the tabloids may be giving people the wrong impression.

"For lots of people in Canada, accessing rehabilitation facilities for drug and alcohol abuse is much more of a challenge than it appears to be for people in Hollywood," Goldbloom said.

Not only are rehab facilities scarce, there is no market-based health-care system which would allow Canadians to buy their way into the service for the right amount of money.

Tales of redemption

Despite the crotch shots and the copious amounts of drugs being slashed about, the fans have not been turned off for good.

Embattled celebrities continue to capture the imagination because Americans are enthralled with stories of redemption, says U.S. entertainment journalist and author Liane Bonin.

"The American public loves to knock you off your pedestal and watch you climb back on. Everyone likes that story, and rehab is one quick and easy way to say 'It wasn't me doing these horrible things, it was the drugs, it was the alcohol,'" Bonin told CTV.ca in a telephone interview from Los Angeles.

But the public could develop a case of compassion-fatigue, said Bonin, author of the young adult novel "Celebrity Skin: Fame Unlimited."

"Some celebrities get into rehab and act out almost immediately," Bonin added. "And it's because their reasons for going into rehab are not truly to fix the problem, they are for purposes of publicity and the public is savvy to that." She notes that soon after Lohan admitted she was attending AA meetings, she was seen partying at hip Hollywood hotspot Hyde.

But Bonin says Lohan and other young celebutantes aren't entirely to blame for their wild child behaviour. She says Lohan and others likely blow off steam because of the pressures they face in Hollywood.

"Lindsay Lohan was a child star, and that creates a dynamic with the adults in their life which I think is very troublesome for them later in life, which is they have a lot of control and power, sometimes they are paying all the bills in their family," Bonin said.

"She has a situation where she is making a lot of money; no one seems to be telling her what to do."

Why teens do stupid things

The attention on the girls gone wild comes amid the release of a study that finds adolescents engage in bad behaviour because they find benefits -- such as the immediate gratification of peer acceptance -- are worth the risks.

"They actually weigh pros and cons, combine perception of risk and perception of benefits and often conclude these risks are "worth it," Valerie Reyna, co-director of the Center for Behavioral Economics and Decision Research, told CTV.ca in a telephone interview from Ithaca, NY.

The study, published in the September issue of the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, found teens do indeed weigh the pros and cons of engaging in high-risk behaviour.

"Being accepted among your peers is very motivating among most humans," says study co-author Reyna, a Cornell University professor of human development and of psychology.

"We originated in tribes and it makes sense that we would care about what other humans care about ... But young people are more sensitive to it than adults are."

While these starlets have been preened to look adult by their stylists, they are ultimately very young, Bonin points out.

She adds that it's important to note that Lohan and company are not so different than their less-famous counterparts who are likely getting smashed at keg parties every weekend.

What separates the two groups? Lohan and her peers live in a celebrity bubble surrounded by yes-men and sycophants.

"They're dealing with a lot of people who don't have much moral grounding and those are the people who are more influential as opposed to maybe your parents or even your advisers -- and you pay your advisers so they can only say so much," she said.

"If their agents say they don't like something, they can say "I don't like you," and can them." The only feedback they are getting is what they hear from friends, or what they pick on the Internet.

"Ironically, the only thing they are picking up on the Net is that they are getting a lot of publicity. They don't understand that a picture of themselves climbing out of a car with their underwear off is perhaps not the path to Academy Award," she said.

"We don't realize that these kinds of starlets just go through the shredder every five years. They don't have a long shelf-life," she said, adding pointedly that, "Meryl Streep was not one of these people."

But times have changed. What was once seen as shocking and scandalous, like Sharon Stone's groundbreaking scene in "Basic Instinct," now seems tame.

These days, the public is so accustomed to outrageous behaviour that no one bats an eye at nudity, Bonin said.

"It's no longer shocking if someone does a nude layout in Playboy anymore. That's considered kind of cute and nowadays everyone has a sex tape," she said.

"If you want to get into the tabloids, and apparently a lot of these kids do, you have to really do something shocking. I have no idea where else we can go.

"Because we've seen it all."