Brooke Shields in a New York Time op ed piece criticizes Tom Cruise’s ” ridiculous rant” against her using medication and therapy for her postpartum depression.
To suggest that I was wrong to take drugs to deal with my depression, and that instead I should have taken vitamins and exercised shows an utter lack of understanding about postpartum depression and childbirth in general.
Once we admit that postpartum is a serious medical condition, then the treatment becomes more available and socially acceptable.
Just in case you’re not sure where she stands on stigmatizing a medical condition, here’s some more
Since writing about my experiences with the disease, I have been approached by many women who have told me their stories and thanked me for opening up about a topic that is often not discussed because of fear, shame or lack of support and information.
This part is great. Congrats for her standing up to Tom Cruise’s clueless kooky rant.
However in People magazine, (post deleted) she attacks on of the major treatments of ADD, ADD medications, in particular Ritalin.
I agree with him (Tom Cruise) about his feeling on prescribing drugs to kids. We are in accord,” she tells PEOPLE. “I don’t think Ritalin should be prescribed to kids. Postpartum depression is a different matter. I think I’m more qualified to talk about that (than he is).
What ignorance and hypocrisy! What make her qualified to comment on medications for Attention Deficit Disorder? Where’s her medical degree? How much research has she done and where has she done it? Or is she just pulling an opinion out of her posterior? Anyone can do that.
There are hundreds if not thousands of studies on Ritalin; it’s one of the most studied drugs in history. By in large, they know most of the good, the bad and the ugly about it. ADD medications can be very useful to people with ADD, although they’re not the be all and end all, you still need the skills component. For example, through ADHD coaching, therapy, support groups etc.
So someone else with obviously no real factual knowledge of her former medical condition shouldn’t be allowed to comment on it (Cruise), but she’s allowed to comment on another medical condition with apparently no real factual knowledge of it?
So your medical condition is serious one but ours isn’t? Shields is helping to reduce the social acceptability of ADD and consequently reduce the availability of treatment through stigmatizing ADHD, while simultaneously crying foul when it’s done to her condition. What a clueless hypocrite! Didn’t she learn anything from what Tom Cruise tried to do to her?