Depression on Parade

In March 1999, I wrote my first piece on depression for Suite101.com. Since then, a number of events have occurred in the public arena, each having a major impact on how our others see us:

Sometimes you think nothing has changed. A TV series called Wonderland pitted sympathetic doctors and staff against mental patients out of Central Casting, ER aired an episode featuring an attractive resident being stabbed to death by a scruffy psychiatric patient, and Jim Carrey starred in a movie with the promo, "From gentle to mental."

Then again, everything changed. This year featured not one, but two Emmys to actresses in roles that tackled mental illness head on, first to Sally Field for playing a character with bipolar in ER, and second to Judy Davis for her portrayal of the troubled Judy Garland. Then there was the HMO documentary on Bellevue Hospital, which cast the patients in a harsh but sympathetic light. Another HMO documentary, the heart-rending "Daughter of Suicide," examined the grief of a family of suicide survivors, and an AMC piece on Marilyn Monroe's final days brought her bipolar out into the open.

Never underestimate the power of disclosure. In Dec 2000, Carrie Fisher of Star Wars fame came out of the bipolar closet in a feature piece on Prime Time, which more than compensated for media mogul Ted Turner's public denial of the bipolar for which he had been treated. But the major breakthrough came in mid-1999, when then Second Lady Tipper Gore went public about her depression, both in an article in USA Today and in an appearance on Oprah. Soon after, she chaired a highly public White House Conference on Mental Health.

Then there was Minds in Motion, a highly visible depression awareness campaign using athletes as its poster people. The word was getting out: There's no shame in having depression; help is available.

Meanwhile, for the first time, awards rained down from the heavens: This year a McArthur "genius grant" went to bipolar expert and patient Kay Jamison and a National Book Award to Andrew Solomon for his The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, and for the first time a Nobel Prize was awarded to a psychiatrist, Eric Kandel of Columbia University in 2000 for his work on signal transduction in the nervous system.

What next, an Oscar? As if to make up for all of Hollywood's past sins, director Ron Howard has just come out with the critically acclaimed "A Beautiful Mind," the story of John Forbes Nash Jr, who has schizophrenia and who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, starring Russell Crowe.

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