CAN'T SPIN AWAY DRUG, MENTAL PROBLEMS

People who have mental or emotional issues may be misled by the Hollywood
spin mental health has recently received. "Superman" co-star Margot Kidder,
who has a history of excessive drinking and mental illness, now says she
healed her body, which made her bipolar disorder and other mental health
diagnoses disappear.

And comedian Martin Lawrence has produced a concert movie to portray his
version of events that put him in headlines and on the evening news in the
late 1990s. The movie, "Runteldat," is currently playing, and is said to be
aimed at critics: "I'm still here. Now run tell that."

Lawrence admits he was on "something he bought from his dope man" when he
was apprehended after standing at a freeway intersection with a weapon,
shouting obscenities and mumbling incoherently. Following that incident, he
went to a psychiatric ward for a while.

So was he also under the influence of something he bought from his dope man
when he was arrested for assault in a nightclub, or when he collapsed from
heat exhaustion?

Perhaps someone should run and tell Lawrence there is nothing funny about
substance abuse. For many people, getting high, getting loaded or taking
the edge off are the first steps of their journey into addiction.

Lawrence makes money by making people laugh. So in an attempt to sustain
his marketability, he needs to make his fans laugh at his misfortune. But I
fail to see the humor in the near-death experiences of a substance abuser.

Kidder, best known as Lois Lane in the "Superman" movies, comes from a
different angle. Now referring to herself as a poster child for mental
health, she says her mental illness is a thing of the past.

"For me, the solution was finally getting away from psychiatric drugs and
actually healing my body so I wouldn't have the symptoms that are called
mental illness," said Kidder, now appearing in the "Vagina Monologues" at
the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

Just as Lawrence's jokes aren't really funny, Kidder's explanations don't
fully explain. "I've been diagnosed with everything from schizophrenia to
manic depression to attention deficit disorder," she has said. After going
missing for three days in April 1996, she was discovered -- delusional,
dirty, bruised, missing bridgework and her hair hacked off -- in a woodpile
in a Los Angeles neighborhood.

Her symptoms were serious, and after the incident, Kidder revealed she had
dealt with mental illness most of her adult life. She also seemed to blame
the incident on the psychiatric medication she was taking. Today, she is an
advocate of orthomolecular therapy, a controversial field of medicine that
claims major mental illnesses can be treated through a carefully planned
nutritional program.

Is Kidder for real, or is this PR strategy?

The cause of schizophrenia is still unknown, so are we to believe its
symptoms are so easily vanquished?