Depression, post-partum blues and Hollywood

In an interview, Tom Cruise spoke diminutively about psychiatry, calling it a “pseudo-science”. He also criticized the actress Brook Shields’ decision to take Paxil, an antidepressant, to treat her post-partum blues. His remarks smack of hubris and ignorance, and do disservice to all those who are in the profession, rendering help to the mentally ill. He instead advocates scientology, a dubious faculty that recommends taking vitamins and exercise to combat depression. He claims it benefited him in fighting his blues. Freud might have squirmed in his grave.
Brook Shields retorted that since Tom had never suffered from post-partum depression he had no authority to speak on the matter. Morning sickness, the pangs of labor and post-partum depression are the terms most women can understand better than men do. It’s the woman’s domain of suffering. Leaving post-partum depression untreated would be perilous not only to the woman but also to the infant. Vitamins cannot alone stop a depressed woman who is seriously intent on taking her own life. It’s true that psychiatric treatment does not offer dramatic results or instant recovery to every mental patient with the means of treatment that are available at the shrinks’ disposal. There are many factors that determine the course of illness or prognosis. Some patients have bleak prospects and are weakly resigned to the world-shunning despair of melancholia or schizophrenia. It is a downward spiral for them but a sizable chunk of the patients can live with an appreciable level of comfort and be of fruitful utility to the society if they receive medication and family support at the right time. But this is the case also with the somatic diseases. Tuberculosis is very much treatable, as is malaria, but people in many parts of the world die in large numbers due to these very diseases. Most of the alternative cures for depression are dubious and at best can cure occasional blues and offer little respite in severe depression, that only the psychiatric treatment can claim to do. It is true that the present generation of antidepressants is notorious for its side-effects, yet the magic bullet is perhaps not too far. With more and more receptors being identified each day and newer antidepressant compounds becoming increasingly selective and effective, it might not be too far when depression would be as treatable as a bout of flu. The advent of Largactil(chloropromazine) in the fifties was a revolution in psychiatric medicine because with its use, the patients got freedom from manacles and became manageable for those looking after them. Without medication, an insomniac would be watching TV the whole night or rolling uneasily in his bed from want of sleep. A sedative or a hypnotic can ameliorate much of his distress. Suggesting something so negative about psychiatry as what Tom said might deter those who are seeking psychiatric treatment, something that can be seriously detrimental to their lives as well as of those around them. Tom calls Ritalin a “street-drug”. Only a parent of an attention-deficit child can appreciate the difference it can make to the child’s life. Ritalin abuse, mostly by students who want to enhance their grades, is a different issue altogether.
Many are enamored by the limelight, the ostentatious lifestyle of Hollywood stars and the whopping wealth they earn. But it is also synonymous with multiple-marriages, broken homes, drugs, jilt, resentment, depression and suicide. Instances such as of Marilyn Monroe, Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz and … would more than prove the point.
(This is an old post meant for publishing in a newspaper, written by me long ago. Found it on my pc and posted it).