This just in from the world of entertainment news: Tom Cruise, or shall we say Dr. Tom Cruise, has taken it upon himself to help heal the suffering. Cruise is a follower of the Church of Scientology, and his religious conviction has led him to believe that modern ailments can be cured through alternative methods. What he practices in his own life is his own business and if it works for him, great. I fully support religious pluralism throughout the world. But he had to go poking his nose into someone else's business, and that's when it got personal.
Brook Shields wrote a memoir recently called "Down Came the Rain," about the postpartum depression she experienced after the birth of her daughter in 2003. Postpartum depression is common and isn't well-understood yet. Cruise commented on Shields' use of Paxil to help treat her extreme depression caused by fluxuations in hormones and chemicals. Cruise said in an interview with Access Hollywood set to air Thursday (via the New York Daily News), "These drugs are dangerous. I have actually helped people come off. When you talk about postpartum, you can take people today, women, and what you do is you use vitamins. There is a hormonal thing that is going on, scientifically, you can prove that. But when you talk about emotional, chemical imbalances in people, there is no science behind that. You can use vitamins to help a woman through those things."
Obviously he knows exactly what he's talking about, as his eloquence on the subject demonstrates. I try not to make personal issues of the topics I post on my blog, but as a woman who fights with her hormones on a monthly basis (as do most other women), I must personally say that some people JUST DON'T GET IT. I hope Brooke Shields told Cruise where he could put those vitamins. True, holistic medicine and alternative therapies can be very beneficial for men and women struggling with all sorts of health problems. But as each month passes and I fall victim once again to the storms in my mind that pass with each placebo pill that I punch from the packet, I realize more and more that women are at the mercy of our hormones. It's a problem that doctors have really only scratched the surface of. What may seem like a little bloated crankiness to men is a reaction within our bodies that we can't control and often don't understand. Brooke Shields struggled with a severe hormonal imbalance after she gave birth, and on top of trying to take care of this newborn baby on little sleep, she had to battle the feelings of fear and frustration at not being able to shake her depression.
A dear friend once said to me, "Sometimes I think I've gotten crazier as I've gotten older, because I just get so PMSy. But I realized that it's all relative. When I was a teenager, I was crazy all the time (as most teenagers are), and now that my hormones have evened out, when I do get PMS, it seems so much worse." She's right. I'm not saying we're all just a big ball of hormones and men should just wear armor all the time. I am saying that when the hormones hit us women hard, we really cannot fully control it. We think about things too much. We get upset at little things. We really crave certain foods and we get bloated. And when it passes, we wonder why we got so upset, why we felt suffocated and cloudy, why things seemed like such a big deal. We feel ashamed of ourselves for not being able to control it. We feel like such fools for letting it affect our work and our relationships and our living space. We get mad at our bodies because we know it will happen again next month and we hate our doctors for not coming up with a real solution. Shame on Tom Cruise for publicly lashing someone about an issue he can't possibly understand, and shame on Tom Cruise for his lack of empathy for a fellow celebrity, a fellow human being, a woman just trying to live her own life.
Tom Cruise must be suffering from Short-Man's Syndrome: an ailment which causes the vertically challenged male to think that HE has the ultimate wisdom and experience to advise others on matters he truly knows nothing about. They have a vitamin for that, don't they?
