TOMMY, CAN YOU HEAR ME?

Tom Cruise....God, what a brainwashed jackass. (For anyone living in a cave who DOESN'T know what I'm talking about, I'm referring to his Today show interview where he basically told Matt Lauer that psychiatry was a joke, mental health drugs are dangerous, "there's no such thing as a chemical imbalance", and that anyone with a mental illness can fix themselves with exercise and vitamins.)

Although I may have to concede one point to the man. When he said that "psychiatry is a pseudo-science", he may have been right, depending on what he meant by that. (Although did anybody notice that right before he said that, he made a derogatory remark about psychology? Hey Tom--psychiatry and psychology are NOT the same thing! Guess you didn't study the history as well as you think you did.)

Anyway, if by his pseudo-comment he meant that mental illness is a crock of shit, then I'm sorry, but HE's the one who's full of shit. On the other hand, here we are in the 21st century and we still don't know definitively what causes mental illness.

As for mental health drugs being dangerous, here's a newsflash for you Tommy: ALL drugs are potentially dangerous, depending on how you use them. Abuses of aspirin and other NSAIDs (ibuprofen, Aleve, etc.) can cause stomach bleeding. Abuse of Tylenol can cause liver damage. However, all of these drugs are safe and helpful when taken correctly. Think about that the next time you (or Katie) have a headache.

As for there being no such thing as a chemical imbalance--criminy, this comment is just too stupid for words. Your brain (yes, even your little pea-sized dickbrain) is loaded with chemicals--gaba, glutamate, serotonin, and dopamine, to name a few. Sometimes our brains make too much of one or more of these chemicals. Sometimes they don't make enough. And sometimes they make the right amount, but the chemicals don't get where they're supposed to go. When one or more of these things go on, we call it an IMBALANCE. See? It's not that hard to figure out.

Exercise & vitamins being a cure-all, huh? Don't make me laugh. It is true that exercise and good eating are part of maintaining one's health. And it is true that these things can alleviate some minor forms of mental illness, such as mild depression and anxiety. But when one has the kind of imbalance I've described above, all the exercise & vitamins in the world won't fix it.

I'd love to know what your buddy Rosie O'Donnell thinks of you now that you've inserted your foot into your pretty mouth. And while I'm name-dropping, maybe you can bulldoze Matt Lauer with your "knowledge" of psychiatry & mental illness, but I doubt you could do the same thing to Mike Wallace. He's battled clinical depression too.

I have no neat and tidy ending to my rant, but I had to get this off my chest.
- posted by Pat @ 3:29 PM