You'd think achieving fame and fortune would be enough, something you'd take seriously and with caution, but so many actors and celebrities hit the big time then go straight for the drugs.
The problem boils down to
incentives: get famous, make money, don't have to work. No driving requirement to get up every day & contribute to the work for financial gain to support yourself. Get bored. Stay up late. Start going to parties. Drink & drug yourself to death. It's pretty common because it's hard to escape human nature. Wikipedia has a huge list of famous people who have gone out that way:
I think there's an additional layer of difficulty if you're an actor, because most people have a finite shelf life of silver-screen usability based on your age & looks. iirc it was after Robert Redford got famous, they were interviewing him about how it felt to be rich and he thought about it and said well, I just don't have to worry about money anymore. So with money out of the way, it's easy to fall into the cycle of needing fame & attention. If your self-worth is tied to that & Hollywood no longer values your acting services as much as you get older, what then? How do you cope? Especially if you have millions of dollars at your disposal?
I suspect a large part of the way the world is setup the way it is is to prevent us from getting into further trouble by keeping us busy lol. Like, the Star Trek future would never work, where we have replicators & people only work if they
want to, because we'd probably all just be addicts of one form or another who stay up into the wee hours of the night because we have no incentives driving us to action. I thought the Depressed Thor character they did in the Avengers was pretty accurate, having gone through that phase myself (
several times, lol).
It sounds like this lady was going through some stuff. RIP.