Cruise Control

Posted on July 3, 2005 in Celebrity Psycho-bunk

I haven’t died or given up writing. I’ve just attended a few support group meetings, puttered around the house, planned a little for my Tuesday session, and read about lobsters.

It causes the mind to stall in the face of an ugly wind when the details of how Tom Cruise came to be on record about the so-called phoniness of psychiatry. When I heard that he specifically went after Brooke Shields because she used antidepressants following a pregnancy, I was even more stunned. Why did he pick on her?

I didn’t see the Cruise interview and Shields’ Friday editorial in the New York Times leaves me mystified:

“I was hoping hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but after Tom Cruise’s interview with Matt Lauer on the NBC show “Today” last week, I feel compelled to speak not just for myself but also for the hundreds of thousands of women who have suffered from postpartum depression.”

The beginning of this sounds to me like there is a history behind this exchange. What are Brooke and Tom hiding from us?

I, of course, sympathize with Shields. As she writes, depression is no fun. Cruise is partly right when he says that vitamins and exercise help, but there are cases of people who took their vitamins and ran for a bit only to commit suicide when they came home. Cruise complains about the unseen history of psychiatry. I commend to him some reading on the history of Scientology, beginning with Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science — written in the 1950s and still in print.

One must ask what Cruise’s fear of psychiatry is based upon? Why, even more so, does he fear patients such as myself? One may attempt to expose a perpetrator of harm, a seller of snake oil. On the other hand, ridiculing those who buy the product seems to me to go well beyond public benefit. It suggests to me a paranoia — fear of the mentally ill that Cruise attempt to rectify by trying to will them to pretend that they are not mentally ill.

Cruise on a mental ward would be interesting to watch. Can you see him going up to a schizophrenic and attempting to talk to him? I’m sure that Cruise would write off such people as merely resistant to his teaching. At least when a psychiatrist finds that one med does not work, she tries another. Cruise has only one trick in his closet and when he fails, he blames the victim.

Then there is the matter of the “history of psychiatry” that Cruise mentions. Oh where, oh Cruise, can one find this history? Ah, at your local Church of Scientology! Oh, no, your motives are purely humanitarian. You want everyone to know just as long as they come to your church and pay the tithe.

I’m not buying. On the matter of your commentary, I agree with the acting governor of New Jersey:

‘Tom Cruise knows as much about postpartum depression as I do about acting, and he should stick to acting and not talk about women who need help,” said Richard J. Codey, whose wife, Mary Jo, has struggled with the illness.

The history of anti-psychiatry should be brought to a close. I have seen, recently, its effects on people who exposed to the words of Thomas Szasz or the Scientologists went off their meds. They do not get better. They enter the tripods and bash themselves silly believing they are Martians.