Mourning Ledger: Good Grief or Morbid Obsession?

Bloggers debated the appropriateness of Day-Lewis' comments much the way they have discussed coverage of Ledger's death, some emotionally involved and others wondering what all the fuss is about.

On the media blog Gawker.com, one commenter said, "I was very moved by Day-Lewis's words," while another slammed him for invoking Ledger's passing yet again. "Rudy [Giuliani] is to 9/11 as Day-Lewis is to Heath Ledger."

For some people, however, mourning celebrities, is an important way of dealing with grief in their own lives, psychologists told ABC NEWS.com.

Venting with strangers about grief on the Internet and grieving for celebrities we never met are both related to a thoroughly modern sense of alienation, psychologists said.

"As people move around and have less family locally, there is a tendency to want to identify with people we don't know," said Worden. "In the global community, we crave affiliations and attachments and that binds to people we don't know personally. It is very human to want to attach yourself to and identify with another person."

Identifying with a celebrity like Ledger is a key reason people become emotional over their deaths, grief counselors told ABCNEWS.com.

Mourning the death of a celebrity retriggers suppressed feelings of loss for an actual loved one, said professor Sherri McCarthy, a psychologist and a grief counselor at Northern Arizona University.

"People are vulnerable because these events retrigger memories of losing someone else. If an individual has unresolved, suppressed feeling of grief they may use this opportunity to express those feelings. If a child didn't grieve a parent properly, they can displace that grief on someone in the media."

According to Linda Goldman, a psychologist and author of "Children Also Grieve," we recognize in our celebrities characteristics we value and it is sad to see those peoples' lives cut short.

"When someone dies young and tragically, like Princess Diana or John Kennedy Jr., people are shocked," she said. "It confronts us with our own mortality. We think, 'How can someone that young and promising die?'"