Adult actress Olivia Lua has found dead at a California rehab facility on January 18th, and it’s the 5th porn actress who died in 3 months.
She has been preceded by Olivia Nova, August Ames, Turi Luv and Shyla Stylez.
Even before there was Seraph in July.

They all were successful, with lots of videos and many important rewards.

(Olivia Nova)

What’s happening in the porn industry?

The experts of the porn industry and their colleagues agree that porn is a fine job.
If you are good you can gain lots of money and reach the stars very fast, but it’s not all fireworks there.
The job is freelance, the one that you never know if you’ll work tomorrow.

(August Ames)

So a day the phone is ringing like a crazy, the day after nobody calls you anymore.
You hope and struggle to recover your fame, but you are invisible and your career is at an end.
Worse: you have been replaced by the newest ones.

Furthermore, the porn actors are seeing a lowering of their income due to the online platforms and the democracy of the Web, that allows everyone to post pictures and videos.
This provide fresh free content everyday.
There are still great agencies and place for professionals, of course, but they are pushed to work harder and harder in order to get the same amount of money of the past.
It’s exhausting, and someone falls down.

(Shyla Stylez)

But how much a porn actor or actress gains?

Garion Hall, owner of the website Abbywinters.com, explain in a Quora post:

Nude-only solo: $340
Open leg solo: $408
Explicit solo: $476
Insertions solo: $612
Girl-girl: $1,020
Girl-boy: $1,020

CNBC adds further details:

Female performer, man/woman scene $300-$1,500
Female performer, all-woman scene $700-$1,200
Male Performer $500-$1,500
Director $1,000-$3,000
Cameraperson $500-$700
Sound Technician $300-$400
Production Assistant $100-$250
Writers $250-$400
Still photographers $500
Makeup artists $500

The issue with closed tribes.

Many of these actors and actresses are still young, so why don’t they simply get out of that job?
There is something called identification: when you enter a closed and exclusive “tribe” such as pornography, all your life shapes accordingly in order to fit best the new situation.

Pornography is still stigmatised nowadays, and this leads to a community closed in itself: all your friends are porn actors, all your colleagues are in the porn industry, and so on.
In the meanwhile you are excluded from your old friends.
Some of them don’t tell of their job to their parents and their friends.
It’s something as like as some religious groups.
The difference here is that nobody forces you and it all happens naturally.

Suicide after a break down may happen with narcissistic situations.
Not only about porn industry: think about an entrepreneur who kills himself after his Company broke.
It happens when people identify themselves with something else, and that something else breaks down, leaving a void in the person.
The feeling of this void may lead to suicide sometimes.

I’m a clinical psychologist and I see many of these situations in my office.

It’s not a matter of finding or not finding a new job.
It occurs when the image you have built, in this case the image of a successful pornstar, becomes your identity.
Think about The picture of Dorian Gray, and you find a good explanation of it.
Then it’s very hard to go out from the situation and restoring the past life.

(From the Dorian Gray movie, 2009)

Our Culture is a double edged sword.

Though men appear to be privileged, they are not.
As they are supposed to be always strong, never cry, never complain, they lose a wide part of themselves.
Think about it: daughters are allowed to cry, sons are not.
Many parents teach their sons not to cry: “Be a man, don’t cry”.
This way parents negate a right of their male sons, that is: expressing their full range of feelings.

It’s a Culture that ruins men as well as women.
As women are supposed to stay submissive, men are supposed to be the strong gender, that is a trap as well.
Moreover, our Society has serious troubles with the sexuality of women.

It always existed, but few people ever talked about it, due to social stereotypes.
We come from a Society where men were playboys and women were whores, where husbands were allowed to go with prostitutes and women at home with their children.
This led women to an underground life in order to satisfy their sexual needs.

Fortunately things are changing, yet there are still deep trails from the past times.

Is it really possible for a famous pornstar to get out from their job?

All of this happens when you identify with your image and don’t have an exit strategy.
It happens to many Big Brothers and other reality attendants, for example.

There is a way to go out from this, as Sasha Grey did some time ago.
She left the porn industry and moved to dj, writer and Hollywood, and hired the company Reputation.com to polish her reputation on the web.
The result?
After 321 porn movies, you find only her clean presence when you search for there name.

You can still find her past career if you search her name with some porn related word.
Her videos are not erased from the platforms, of course, but they are pushed down on the search engines, where the second page means oblivion.

(First page form my search of "Sasha Gray", Incognito Mode, logged out from Google, Search Filter unabled, Safari)

Sidenote...

The ironic and tragic side of the matter is that these pornstars are still live and performing on the platforms, and making their producers to gain from their videos.
Their names were in top searches in these platforms the days after the suicide.
The same as the death of a singer or a Hollywood actor.

References:

Images sources: