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Susan Boyle Checks Into Mental Hospital

Susan Boyle, despite her defeat on "Britain's Got Talent," continues to dominate the headlines. Sadly, it's not for the reasons she had hoped.

Yesterday, she was resting in a mental hospital surrounded by news crews, and the British prime minister gave a televised interview to say he'd checked in on her.

Police took the Internet singing sensation to the private Priory clinic Sunday night after she suffered an emotional breakdown -- just 24 hours after Saturday's finale. Producers issued a statement saying she was "exhausted and emotionally drained." One of the show judges, Piers Morgan, wrote on his blog yesterday that Boyle "told me she'd spent most of the week crying, throwing up, not sleeping and generally feeling the weight of the world's pressures on her."

According to British media reports, police were called about 6.p.m. on Sunday to a London hotel where doctors were "assessing a woman under the Mental Health Act." The woman was taken by ambulance to the Priory, a clinic in north London known for its celebrity clientele.

Yesterday, PM Gordon Brown said he had called judges Simon Cowell and Morgan to "be sure that she was okay." Boyle's brother Gerry told the Edinburgh Evening News he spoke to his sister just before she was admitted. "First and foremost, we have to make sure she is happy, and she is -- she wouldn't change all this for the world. ... But she will bounce back."

Boyle appeared to be a magnanimous loser, saying "the best people won." The tabloids, however, reported a darker face of defeat, saying she stormed down a corridor and screamed: "I hate this show!" By the next night, she was acting so erratically that police were called to her hotel.

Boyle's scheduled tours in Britain and the United States are on hold, as are the millions she stands to earn from albums and a possible book and television biopic about her extraordinary rise. One commentator on the Times of London Web site urged her to return to her pre-fame life: "Susan, go back to your pussycat for Heaven's sake. Who needs all this?"

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/reliable-source/2009/06/rs-boyle2.htm
l?hpid=news-col-blog

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