Tina Fey didn't kill Dr Fredrick Brandt. Mental illness did.

This week a man died. In entirely awful, tragic circumstances.

It’s a death we would not have heard much about if it weren’t for the tenuous involvement of a celebrity.

The man was Dr Frederic Brandt. The 65-year-old was a high-profile dermatologist who had been treating wealthy clients in New York City since 1982. Dr Brandt – nicknamed the Baron of Botox – had written two books on his beloved fillers, charged around $7000 per appointment, had luxury homes in New York and Miami and was most famed for something called the Y Lift, where fillers are injected under the cheekbones to create a “non invasive” facelift.

He treated Madonna, who says, “If I have nice skin, I owe a lot to him.” And Stephanie Seymour, and Kelly Ripa, and many, many others.

This is Dr Brandt:

Dr Brandt also suffered from depression. And on Sunday, April 5, he killed himself at his Miami home.

Why are we discussing the death of a doctor on the other side of the world, when the planet is full of far greater horrors this week? This is why:

That is an image from comedy show called The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It is written and produced by Tina Fey.

The character pictured above is a flamboyant, syringe-wielding cosmetic surgeon called Dr Franff. Played by Martin Short, Franff has had so much filler injected into his own face that he can barely open his mouth to speak, or close his eyes to blink, and his face contorts deflates and reflates with the puff of a straw.

As soon as the show was uploaded, comparisons were drawn between Dr Brandt and the fictional Dr Franff (post continues after video).

“It was bullying, It was a mean characterisation,” People Magazine quote a source as saying.

“It was making fun of him for the way he looked and it was mean and it was bullying.”

And as soon as the news of Dr Brandt’s death broke at the weekend, fingers began to point.

The link between Fey’s TV show and Brandt’s death gained so much traction that Brandt’s publicist,  Jacquie Tractenberg, was forced to comment.

“He did not commit suicide because of the show. The show didn’t help. It was mean. He felt bullied. It was mean-spirited picking at the way he looked for no reason at all. But he suffered from depression before that.”

In the face of the criticism, Miami police have commented that Brandt was being treated for depression in the weeks before his death. He was taking medication, and had a male friend staying with him, specifically to try to safeguard him from self-harm.

But those revelations have not stopped the paparazzi who are now stalking Tina Fey, her husband (a producer on the show) and daughters. Fey has not yet commented, although her husband says the death is “very sad”, and the formidable writer and producer doubtless knows that she and her writers will be asked about this incident for years to come.

And this is what they’ll be asking: Did you go too far? Was it cruel to to create a character that was identifiable to anyone in showbusiness as bearing an uncanny resemblance to a real person?

The short answer to that question, is no.

The death of Doctor Brandt is tragic.

For his friends and family, it’s an unimaginable loss. But he was not killed by a TV show.

He was killed by mental illness, which takes far too greater toll on its sufferers everywhere in the world and shows no regard for age, social status or profession.

Read more: What if we could eliminate suicide? Entirely.

It’s impossible for any of us to know what was going on in Dr Brandt’s mind last weekend. Only he and his professional carers know the extent of his suffering. It reduces the implications of the effects of mental illness to suggest that a broad swipe from a TV show can be its final catalyst.

But there is no question that Dr Brandt, and the industry he worked in, are absolutely fair game for parody. Because the industry is ridiculous.

If the criteria for satire is that you are punching upwards, taking shots at establishment figures who are held in esteem, then the cosmetic surgery industry is squarely within target.

This is an industry that profits almost exclusively from patients’ insecurities. On their fear of ageing. Of their endless need to compare themselves to others. And this is an industry that frequently goes “too far”.

The pioneering Dr Brandt was his own guinea pig, admitting to injecting himself regularly to test out new fillers as they came on the market. “I’ve been kind of a pioneer in pushing the limits to see how things work and what the look would be,” he told the New York Times in a profile piece last year.

He said that his mission was to “keep people working and feeling vital and good about themselves.” And that: “I want people to feel they haven’t given up on life and are still in the game.”

If that sounds noble, like some sort of altruistic career-extension program for people in the entertainment industry, we all need to take a step back and consider the values that inform a culture where looking unnaturally inflated from filling your face with foreign bodies is far preferable to having the odd wrinkle.

No matter how wonderful Dr Brandt, his colleagues and clients might be as human beings, it is an extreme case of the Emperor’s New Clothes to not to be able to point out that they have also disfigured themselves to a point of the grotesque. And that, also, is apparently preferable to looking Old.

The influence of the faces we see around us every day, on TV screens, on movie posters and advertising billboards matter. They have immense power.

Brandt and many, many others have become rich on making women (in particular) feel terrible about their lines, about their thighs, about their stomachs. Insecurity and neuroses have built their penthouses, their luxury homes, their art collections.

And if that isn’t ripe for parody, there’s little that is.

All that Tina Fey and her team are guilty of is having an ability to skewer the truth about our superficial culture.

And we need people to do that, fearlessly.