Thank you, Catherine Zeta-Jones

[marydell]

Catherine Zeta-Jones checked into a mental health facility, and rather than calling it exhaustion or some other vague thing, she had her rep announce that she has bipolar II disorder. For someone who's never had a public scandal of any sort that I can recall, and no reason to be forthcoming about her health, that's really extraordinary, and I think it will do a lot of good. Partly by helping chip away at the stigma of mental illness, and partly by putting a list of symptoms in front of a lot of people who might not otherwise know what they're struggling with.

Comments

[rydra_wong]

*nods a lot*

Good for her (and hopefully she'll be stabilized and well again soon).

[trouble]

Oh wow. Oh wow.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Wow. I think I will see if I can write her a fan letter.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Yes, this. It is lovely when people in the public eye are exactly as forthcoming about mental illness as they are about other illnesses.

This takes away a lot of the bad taste in my brain from Jonathan Franzen's incredibly blockheaded piece in the New Yorker about David Foster Wallace--I sympathized with his pain at the loss of a friend, but I recoiled at his lack of understanding about suicidal ideation and chronic depression.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Actually, it wasn't the lack of understanding that bothered me; it was the way he was so Confidently Wrong, and at such length. Ew.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear. Google turned up a couple of excerpts but not the whole thing...it seemed to be going in the direction of depression-as-philosophy instead of depression-as-illness...?

[notacrnflkgirl.livejournal.com]

I love her for this.