Jim Carrey says he knows how to heal people with depression - but does he?

It was interesting to learn that Jim Carrey was set to write a self-help book on depression since the comedian has experienced it himself - although Page Six in The New York Post is now saying that it was all a "joke."

Either way, can he be trusted based on these conflicting reports, as well as his opinion that medication may not be considered "an answer?" He also has a history of producing material that has drawn the ire of the mental health community.

Known for his slapstick performances in the "Ace Ventura" series, Carrey battled depression for a long time after he became famous and resorted to Prozac to cope, the sun.co.uk reports. However, he now believes that medicines are not the answer and wants people to deal more with the root causes, according to the report.

He said: "I dealt with depression for a while by medicating with Prozac and although it was good for dealing with the problem there and then, I wasn't getting to the bottom of my anger and frustration.

"I think we have a real problem these days in that everything is treated with a drug. I think there's a whole new way of healing depression that doesn't require drugs - and I'm writing a book about it."

Mental health activists, meanwhile, have long argued that Carrey's 2000 film, "Me, Myself and Irene," is ignorant, insensitive and filled with myths about schizophrenia, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Company.

In the film, Carrey plays a cop with a mental illness. He's mild-mannered when he takes his medicine, but abusive and even violent when he doesn't.

Doctors say the film and its promotional campaign showing Carrey with a split personality and a tendency to be violent reinforce outdated stereotypes about schizophrenia, according to the CBC.

"Many people in the public have the wrong impression that schizophrenia is an illness that causes people to become dangerous...and that just isn't the case," psychiatrist Dr. Robert Zipursky told the CBC.

Ian Chovril struggled with schizophrenia for 10 years before he was treated, according to the CBC. He doesn't believe there's anything funny about Carrey's movie.

"This one really distorts the truth. This one is really using mental illness and schizophrenia in particular as a plot device, without any regard to the nature of the illness," he says.

Anti-medication groups combine forces to fight "forced drugging"

Promising to fight what they call "pervasive and harmful violations of mental health clients" who receive drugs and electric shock treatment in the United States, The Law Project for Psychiatric Rights and the MindFreedom Shield Campaign announced today a joint Task Force on Mental Health Legal Advocacy & Activism.

Task Force organizers say the combination of PsychRights' expertise for strategic litigation and the "people power" of MindFreedom activists around the country will bring a synergy and geographic reach to their demands for people’s "legal and human rights" regarding medication use.

The new partnership of law and nonviolent activists has an initial focus in the states of California, Massachusetts and New York, organizers say.

"People's rights in forced drugging proceedings are ignored as a matter of course, resulting in great harm to them and decreased public safety," PsychRights' President Jim Gottstein said.

David Oaks, director of MindFreedom International, said violence committed by individuals labeled "mentally ill" has led to a backlash calling for a "massive increase in forced psychiatric drugging."

"Contrary to public perception, forcing people to take psychiatric drugs can often increase violence, rather than decrease it," said Gottstein. "If people were warned that both taking and withdrawing from these drugs can at times contribute to committing terrible acts, they and their loved ones can be alert to the possibility and tragedies averted."

Going off your meds could have serious consequences

Only 4 percent of Americans with mental illness kill. But many of those cases involve people who didn't pay enough attention to their condition.

The Campus Police at Northern Illinois University say Stephen Kazmierczak, the man responsible for killing five people and himself, had stopped taking his medication before the shootings, according to news reports.

The medications the Northern Illinois shooter were not identified. But the incident speaks to the potential consequences of deciding to not take any prescribed medications.

Once on their medications, physicians say, patients feel fine and feel they do not need their medicine. But any psychological disorder should be treated like any other disease.

"If you have diabetes or a different health concern, you can be stable on your medications and feeling really good, but things would go really bad if you went off that medication and it's the same thing with any psychiatric medications," said Elisabeth Kinghorn, an Idaho medical professional who spoke to western news outlets.

Heath Ledger died of an accidental overdose

Heath Ledger died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs that included painkillers, sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication, the New York City medical examiner says.

"Mr. Heath Ledger died as the result of acute intoxication by the combined effects of oxycodone, hydrocodone, diazepam, temazepam, alprazolam and doxylamine," medical examiner's spokeswoman Ellen Borakove said in a news release that was reported by The Associated Press.

The medical examiner's office only provided generic names, so it is unknown whether he took generic or brand-name drugs, according to The Associated Press. Police had said they found six types of prescription drugs, including sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication, in Ledger's apartment.

Oxycodone is a painkiller marketed as OxyContin and used in other painkillers such as Percodan and Percocet; hydrocodone is used in a number of painkillers, including Vicodin. Diazepam and alprazolam are the generic names for the anti-anxiety drugs Valium and Xanax, and the other two drugs are sleep aids commonly sold under the brands Restoril and Unisom, according to The Associated Press.

Heath Ledger's autopsy results could be revealed; what will the public learn?

The answer to why Heath Ledger died could be revealed as early as today, according to the Melbourne Daily Sun.

But a public that has been clamoring for information regarding the late actor may not get all their questions answered - not right away, at least.

The New York Chief Medical Examiner's Office, responsible for Ledger's autopsy and deciphering tests undertaken on his blood and tissue, confirmed today it was close to announcing the cause of the 28-year-old Australian actor's death, the paper reported.

"We're expecting something in the next two days,'' Ellen Borakove, director of public affairs at the New York Chief Medical Examiner's office, said.

But other questions, such as the official estimated time Ledger died, will not be made public, according to the Sun.

The Sun reported there has been speculation since Ledger's body was discovered in the bedroom of his rented Manhattan apartment on Jan. 22 that the actor may have been saved if medical help was called earlier.

New York police have said masseuse Diana Wolozin, who found Ledger's lifeless body, called Hollywood actress Mary-Kate Olsen several times before alerting paramedics.

NYPD investigators who inspected Ledger's apartment, however, said there were no signs of foul play or evidence to suggest he committed suicide, according to the Sun. They also dismissed reports illegal drugs were found.

Police did find six different types of prescription drugs in the apartment, including pills to treat anxiety and insomnia.

That claim has inspired the media to do more than implicate that drugs contributed to his death (see New York Daily News cover, above) - despite the fact that much of the drug-death evidence is circumstantial.

The media frenzy has inspired many to do a Google search and ask questions that have led them to this blog. They've asked: Can anti-anxiety and anti-depressants be mixed? Was Heath Ledger a drug addict? How will Michelle Williams, his actress-girlfriend, cope?

Based on what's been said, we may never know.

Hey, Woodstock alumni: The "brown acid" actually may be good for you

Dude - psychedelic drugs are back. But not in the traditional drop-in, drop-out sense.

David Jay Brown wrote in the December issue of Scientific American that LSD and magic mushrooms and other drugs that "blew minds in the 1960s" may soon may be used to treat mental ailments.

Scientists say they have "therapeutic potential" because they could ease a variety of difficult-to-treat mental illnesses, such as chronic depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and drug or alcohol dependency, Brown wrote.

Clinical trials are underway - so start lining up, hippies. This time they are being explored in labs for their therapeutic applications rather than being used illegally, Brown wrote.

"The past 15 years have seen a quiet resurgence of psychedelic drug research as scientists have come to recognize the long-underappreciated potential of these drugs," Brown wrote. "In the past few years, a growing number of studies using human volunteers have begun to explore the possible therapeutic benefits of drugs such as LSD [and] psilocybin."

Much remains unclear, but scientists do believe they have somewhat similar psychoactive effects that make them potential "therapeutic tools," Brown wrote.

Though still in their preliminary stages, studies in humans suggest that the day when people can schedule a psychedelic session with their therapist to overcome a serious psychiatric problem may not be that far off.

Crosby Stills Nash & Young - Long Time Gone Lyrics

It's been a long time comin'
It's goin' to be a Long Time Gone.
And it appears to be a long,
Appears to be a long,
Appears to be a long
Time, yes, a long, long, long ,long time before the dawn.

Turn, turn any corner.
Hear, you must hear what the people say.
You know there's something that's goin' on around here,
The surely, surely, surely won't stand the light of day.
And it appears to be a long,
Appears to be a long,
Appears to be a long
Time, yes, a long, long, long ,long time before the dawn.

Speak out, you got to speak out against the madness,
You got to speak your mind,
If you dare.
But don't no don't now try to get yourself elected
If you do you had better cut your hair.
`Cause it appears to be a long,
Appears to be a long,
Appears to be a long,
Time, such a long long long long time before the dawn.

It's been a long time comin'
It's goin' to be a long time gone.
But you know,
The darkest hour is always
Always just before the dawn.
And it appears to be a long, appears to be a long,
Appears to be a long
Time before the dawn.

Faced with loss, Michelle Williams can find hope

If Heath Ledger's ex-girlfriend, Michelle Williams, is looking for inspiration in the face of her loss, she can look no farther than Mary Jo Codey.

Williams (left), an actress, has been out of public view since "The Brokeback Mountain" star's death last week. But she is believed to be very distraught over the loss of the father of her 2-year-old daughter.

Codey, meanwhile, is the wife of Richard Codey, who served as New Jersey's acting governor from 2004 to 2006. But she is known mainly for her public disclosure that she suffered from postpartum depression.

The illness has dominated much of the last 25 years of Codey's life. But her story has inspired many - and now it's culminated with her winning the Eli Lilly Welcome Back Lifetime Achievement Award.

Ten years ago, Eli Lilly and Company, a pharmaceutical promotion company, says it launched the "Welcome Back Awards" to fight the stigma associated with depression and promote the understanding that depression is treatable.

Codey is "an amazing woman who has lent her life, public forum and passion to the cause of perinatal mental health," said Susan Dowd Stone, president of Postpartum Support International. "For years, Mary Jo has been a national spokesperson and crusader for maternal mental health, sharing her story to help other women reach out for help."

Knight-Ridder newspapers recently provided an in-depth and stirring account of how Codey recovered from the depths of postpartum depression to become a national symbol:

After giving birth to a son in 1984, Codey said she didn't feel the joy she saw on her husband's face. Her indifference became irritability, and then she began having thoughts that scared her -- urges to drown Kevin, or put him in the microwave.

Horrified by those images, Codey placed 6-week-old Kevin in her husband's arms and demanded to go to a mental institution.

"I didn't realize that once you were depressed, you could get over it. I just thought I was crazy. I gave the baby to my husband, and I said, 'Find yourself a new wife, Richie, someone who will be good to the baby,'" Codey recounted. "Suicide looked good to me. If you're having thoughts about harming your baby, wouldn't you rather kill yourself?"

At the Carrier Clinic in Belle Mead, N.J., Codey's condition stabilized with antidepressants. She returned home, but hid her experience from her family and friends. "I was afraid that maybe God would think I was ungrateful for the baby, and I wasn't. I went to a fertility doctor for three years to have him."

She stopped taking the medication when she became pregnant with her second son, Christopher, in 1988. By her eighth month, she was severely depressed, and her doctor told her that electric-shock therapy was her only option. She had one 11-week treatment that resulted in some memory loss, but no pain.

"I felt like such a waste of a human being, because there I was, eight months pregnant with a gift, and I was going for shock therapy," she said. "I didn't understand depression was biological and not my fault."

After Christopher's birth, Codey went back on her medication, and this time there were no baby blues.

"I could do and feel the things other mothers did," she said.

She told Kevin, now 20 and a sophomore at Drew University, and Christopher, 16 and a junior at Montclair Academy, about her illness "almost as soon as they could understand English."

"I never wanted them to hear, 'When you were born, your mother was so depressed she went to a psychiatric hospital,"' Codey (right) said. "If I wasn't secure in my relationship with them, I'd be afraid to tell them."

But her battle with depression wasn't over.

Early in 2002, shortly after her husband became copresident of the state Senate, Codey's antidepressants stopped working. Her doctor changed her medicine, but the dosage was too high.
Codey said she recalled opening her refrigerator on St. Patrick's Day, asking Christopher what he wanted for lunch, and then collapsing.

At the hospital, the family was told that doctors had induced a coma to stop seizures caused by the new medication. But then they couldn't bring her out of the coma.

"What do you say to your two teenage sons who ask if Mom is going to live?" her husband said, recalling the days he spent at the hospital.

Codey emerged from the coma after seven days, but struggled without medication for her depression.

Two weeks later, a routine mammogram showed she had breast cancer, the disease that had killed her mother. "I was a mess anyway, so the news didn't frighten me," Codey said. "My family was upset, but I was already as low as I could go."

She had a double mastectomy, fighting the cancer with chemotherapy and the depression with more shock therapy. As her cancer entered remission, a doctor put her on new depression medication that she said had worked well.

Codey said she was struck by the contrast between the care and concern breast-cancer patients receive and the stigmas associated with people suffering from mental illness.

She formed a postpartum-depression group at her local hospital, St. Barnabas, and listened to new mothers recount the same sort of thoughts she'd had. Her husband said he had often come home to find a new mother crying to his wife on the couch.

After Jim McGreevey resigned as governor in November 2004 and her husband became the state's chief executive, Codey resolved to use the opportunity. She speaks to mental-illness and women's groups two or three times a week, she said.

"When we're out on the weekends, women will grab Mary Jo by the arm and say, 'Thank you,'" Richard Codey said. "It helps when you have a survivor who can make people reach out and feel what you're talking about.

Those who felt "maladjusted" can be creative, King said

Mindfreedom International says the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called for "creative maladjustment."

MLK said over and over that the world is in dire need for an "International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment."

Martin Luther King's dream was not, apparently, ever officially realized. Until last year.

MindFreedom International, which works for the human rights of people in the mental health system, intentionally and officially began an "IAACM" as part of its campaign to show "every human being's creative uniqueness and right to be nonviolently different."

"We are proud to be mad, to be vulnerable, to be human beings. We are proud to be maladjusted to a world which believes in war and division, a world which does not value uniqueness, creativity, love, insight and harmony," said Mary Maddock, co-founder of MindFreedom Ireland.

The mental health organization, which prides itself for pushing for mind improvement without medicine, asks people to consider what action they will take to show their "creative maladjustment" as MLK's 80th birthday approaches in 2009.

MLK repeated this theme more than a dozen times in essays and speeches stretching from the 1950s to a keynote speech in front of the American Psychological Association in 1967:

1. MLK said psychologists had a favorite word, "maladjusted."

2. MLK said he was proud to be psychologically maladjusted, that we all ought to be maladjusted to oppression, poverty, war.

3. MLK said the "salvation of the world" lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

Snap out of it! Or can you?

By DARCIE BORDEN
Featured Blogger

I began 2008 with bronchitis and didn't hesitate to go the doctor for antibiotics. I took Zithromax for 5 days and Robitussin DM. I didn't question the doctor's diagnosis, and I took my medicine, no questions asked. After all, our physical health is vulnerable and sometimes needs medical treatment.

But, what about our brain? Can our brain be just as vulnerable to a temporary illness and need medical treatment? When we think of mental illness, it conjures up images of straitjackets and schizophrenia. But, can't the brain have it's own version of a cold?

And why do we seem to think of the brain as separate from the body? It is part of the body, after all. But, mental health is discussed differently from physical health. And there still seems to be a stigma attached to anti-depressants and psychotropic drugs, even though one out of every 10 women and one out of every 17 men is taking these drugs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Furthermore, it is reported that 25 percent of us will experience a major depression at some point in our lives. Depression is in fact a disease.

I experienced my own "mental flu" recently, and now I'm taking Cymbalta, an anti-depressant. But, it took two gynecologists , three family physicians and nine months to convince me to take it. I had never taken drugs for mental health before, and I, like many people, thought I should just "snap out of it." When I finally hoisted up the white flag in surrender, I sort of felt like a failure. But, now in retrospect, now that I have educated myself on the imbalance of brain chemicals and how stress hormones can affect them, I realize how ridiculous it is to feel guilty about it. I don't feel like a failure for getting bronchitis.

This, however, was the first time I couldn't talk myself out of a funk, or pray myself out of it, or will myself out of it, or exercise myself out of it. Yes, eventually, maybe after a year or two, it would end on its own, but only after causing devastation in its wake to my health and possibly my relationships. This was bigger than me and I felt completely helpless. I've had the blues before, such as postpartum blues or small depressions when something upsetting happened or life inevitably changes. But, I always "got over it" in the past without the need for pharmaceutical intervention.

This was the first time I was having panic attacks and I actually understood for the first time the meaning of heartache. My heart actually hurt. In fact, I was sort of having a strange mixture of anxiety and depression. The anxiety was so bad that I couldn't eat and lost 20 pounds. This depression felt different, not like any I'd ever had before, and it felt connected to my hormones, which seemed to be causing my menstrual cycle to become erratic. My instincts told me there was a mind-body connection.

But, the first gynecologist I went to, a man, told me that our hormones don't cause us to go crazy. My first thought was, "Hey mister, I never said I was going crazy!" My second thought was, "Ok, he's fired."

So, for nine months I tried everything. I made lists of what I'm grateful for. They say that works. I wrote in a journal every day to get my feelings out. They say that works. It was so frustrating that my emotions just wouldn't match what I intellectually and rationally knew to be true, which is that I have two beautiful, healthy children, a wonderful husband, a wonderful life, and lots of things to look forward to.

But what was also true was that my life in one year was changing too fast all at once. There were too many things all stressing me out at the same time, and my reservoir for stress spilled over to the point that created a generalized anxiety disorder. It was the perfect storm.

I talked to friends, I tried a therapist, I got the whole slew of blood tests to rule out thyroid disease or any other physical malady that can be associated with depression or anxiety. Heck, I even tried praying the Rosary, and I'm not even Catholic. They say it works, and I was at the point where I would try anything. Anything except anti-depressants.

I was a fool. It should have been as easy as if you have a headache, you take Tylenol. This was just a different kind of headache. In fact, I thought my head was going haywire. I thought I was cracking up. Well, maybe I don't want to be quite so forthcoming. I wouldn't want anyone carting me off to the loony bin. But, what can we fess up to these days? Do other people feel the same way?

What finally convinced me to take Cymbalta was two things. First, during one of my crying spells, I saw a look in my husband's eyes that really bothered me. He looked scared. The only other time I'd seen that fearful look in his eyes was when I had a partially malignant breast tumor removed along with at least a quarter of my right breast.

The second thing was finding a really good doctor who listened. He then referred me to a female gynecologist who said that absolutely this could be related to my hormones changing, especially since I'm almost 40, and that if I'm under a lot of stress it could create all the symptoms I had described, especially since they seemed to happen most at hormonal times of the month.

But, what really made a difference to me was when my new doctor suggested that I take Cymbalta, and he looked into my eyes and said, "I can see you have some hesitation. What are you afraid of?" I've never had a doctor take the time to ask me that before. I told this doctor all my irrational and rational fears, and he didn't judge any of them. He simply said this: "If a doctor told me that I had to take one medication for the rest of my life but that I could pick which one, this is the one I'd choose." Sold!

When I asked this doctor "Why me? Why is this happening? It's never happened to me before." He explained that sometimes low serotonin can be just as hereditary as high cholesterol. Our brain chemistry is subject to the same kinds of hereditary influences as other parts of our body make-up. Someone else might not have the same reaction to my set of circumstances as me, because they don't have my body or my brain.

So, now it's three months later and my dark cloud is gone. I do, however, still feel the cloud trying to cast its shadow every once in a while, and that's how I know it's not time to go off the medication quite yet. The doctor prescribed it for six months. And let me say at this juncture that antidepressants DO NOT cure depression. And they don't make you skip down the street high on life either. But, they do help you manage better until the depression goes away. They help you to maintain a quality of life, enjoy relationships, and function at work and home until the depression goes away. They give you yourself back. Depressions can take anywhere from six months to 2 years to diminish and can vary from mild to severe.

My son Julian told me the other night that my brain is the size of my two fists put together. He showed me with his two little hands, and it made the brain seem less scary. In fact, the brain has no nerve endings, so you can't feel it being cut or burned. But something that seems so powerless somehow has the power to take over our lives. Before antidepressants were discovered, women were called "hysterical" or put in hospitals for severe depression. It was a misunderstood science. It's no wonder that people didn't want to admit to feeling depressed.

And that still carries over to today. No one comes right out and declares that they are on antidepressants, but when I started talking to my friends about the topic, one friend admitted, "Girl, I've been on 'em all." Another told me Lexapro (another antidepressant) saved her life. It seemed like the more I told people my story, the more I found out that almost everyone I knew had at some point in their lives been on an antidepressant or suffered through depression untreated. It's a shame that when we're going through it, we feel so alone and don't realize that it's just part of the human experience. After all, aren't we all just trying to struggle through life? No one has it perfect, and no one has all the answers. We're all in this boat together.

For me, everything always goes back to anthropology, because that is where I find answers. I read that the evolutionary reason we experience depression is to force us back to the cave when we are ill or under severe stress. I also read that when you are at the point of a crying spell, your stress hormones have reached the point of damaging your health. Stress is one of the biggest killers in this country. So, why would we need to go back to the cave? Well, we need to rest if we are ill, or we need to rest after being pursued by that big scary predator. In today's world, that predator could be a boss who demands too much of you.

My brother Jonathan once told me that in a time like this I need to "just stay home." It took me a while to realize what he meant. Give myself permission to just stay home. The world will go on without me for a day, or two. Go back to the cave. Get well.