The beautiful and outspoken star isn’t afraid to make enemies in Hollywood—but is it part of an underlying problem? In a recent interview, Fox said of Transformers director Michael Bay “[He] wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is. So he’s a nightmare to work for.” A response supposedly written by three crew members was posted on the filmmaker’s Web site, calling her “dumb-as-a-rock” among other niceties. Bay took the post down, but says her “crazy quips are part of her crazy charm.” But in the same interview with Wonderland magazine, Fox compared herself to Marilyn Monroe, leading people to wonder if she actually is mentally ill. “I could end up like that because I constantly struggle with the idea that I think I’m a borderline personality—or that I have bouts of mild schizophrenia. I definitely have some kind of mental problem and I haven’t pinpointed what it is,” she said.
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Dave Chappelle’s sketch show was a cultural phenomenon when the comedian abandoned it during the third season and fled to South Africa, sparking rumors that he had entered himself into a psychiatric facility. After two weeks of debate over his whereabouts, Chappelle gave an interview to Time, saying that he was unhappy with the creative direction his show was taking, and that while he needed to take some time for himself, he had not checked into a mental institution. "Let me tell you the things I can do here which I can't at home: think, eat, sleep, laugh. I'm an introspective dude. I enjoy my own thoughts sometimes. And I've been doing a lot of thinking here,” Chappelle said at the time.
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She now has a beautiful baby girl and model boyfriend, but after her first marriage to Atlanta Braves baseball star David Justice fell apart, Halle Berry attempted suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. "I was sitting in my car, and I knew the gas was coming when I had an image of my mother finding me,” she told told Parade four years ago. The Oscar-winning actress blamed depression for her nearly fatal mood and has since made a full recovery. "People still associate therapy with being crazy. But I think you're crazy if you won't consider going to get help for yourself—to learn the tools to deal with the problems in your life. Once people see what it is and what it's not, they race to go back,” she said.
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"Have you ever been invited to a mental hospital?” Carrie Fisher wrote in her memoir Wishful Drinking. “It's a very exclusive invitation. It's sort of like an invitation to the White House, only you meet a better class of people." Clearly laughter has been good medicine for the Star Wars actress and novelist who has written and talked openly about her struggles. “When I was about 24, I had a doctor tell me I was hypomanic," Fisher once admitted. "He said I should go on lithium. I didn't believe him. I thought he was trying to get rid of me." Fisher soon became addicted to drugs to tame her manic side, once taking 30 Percodan a day, until she was diagnosed with manic depression at age 28. Since then, Fisher has written Postcards From the Edge, an autobiography detailing her ordeal, and has been a champion for the millions of people suffering from the same stigma.
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The legendary silent film star’s life was as tragic off-screen as it was comical on. Plagued by alcoholism, bumps in his career, and a $28,000 debt to the government after he stopped paying his taxes in 1933, Keaton was involuntarily committed to a sanitarium in 1934. He was placed in a straitjacket to curb himself from drinking until he finally pulled his life together, although his career never rebounded to its earlier successes. Keaton spoke vaguely of that time, saying, “Of course, it only took about two bad pictures in a row to put skids under you. Oh, everything happened.”
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The wild Jackass star was admitted to Cedars-Sinai hospital under a 14-day hold in early 2008 after being arrested for felony cocaine possession. During that time he wrote a blog post titled “You Should All Know I'm in the Looney Bin" and said his Jackass counterpart Johnny Knoxville begged him to seek help for his bipolar disorder that left him suffering "high highs and extremely low lows." "So far, I've figured out that I did a great deal of damage to my brain by abusing drugs and, now that they've all worn off, I'm facing the consequences,” he continued. Earlier this year, he made a rather stellar comeback with a six-week stint on Dancing With the Stars and an MTV documentary titled Steve-O: Rise and Demise that showed the intervention that saved his life.
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Roseanne was open with her struggles regarding her multiple personality disorder even during the run of her popular self-titled sitcom. In 1994, she confessed she had suffered from it since childhood and has seven personalities named Somebody, Nobody, Baby, Cindy, Susan, Joey, and Heather. A few years ago she said, "I haven't had any blackouts for quite a while. I used to have them minute by minute…I was always in conflict about conflicting parts, but I've learned how to get them to listen to each other now.”
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After her divorce from playwright Arthur Miller was finalized in 1961, the legendary star checked herself into New York’s Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic at the urging of her psychiatrist. Her self-medication is believed to be rooted in undiagnosed depression or bipolar disorder. Soon after her admittance, Marilyn reconsidered her decision and called ex-husband Joe DiMaggio to help transfer her to another hospital. Upon her release, she began filming Something’s Got to Give with Dean Martin, but her erratic on-set behavior caused her to be fired from the George Cukor-directed movie. Monroe was eventually re-instated, but before filming could resume, she was found dead of an apparent drug overdose.
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She captured the world’s attention—and the majority of YouTube bandwidth—with her astonishing performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” on Britain’s Got Talent, but the pressure of fame proved too much for the previously unknown Scot. After losing the competition to a dance troupe, Boyle was admitted to The Priory because of a mental breakdown and exhaustion. She left the clinic after five days and kept a relatively low profile until now—her first full-length album I Dreamed a Dream will be released November 23.
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Director Tim Burton has made a career based on his dark and moody films. The Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands auteur is reported to suffer from bipolar disorder, which is characterized by extreme mood swings of highs and lows. People with bipolar disorder—or manic depression—are usually linked to have creative streaks, which could explain his impressive artistic output.
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Relationship break-ups are sometimes the catalysts for mental breakdowns, and that may apply even more to those constantly plastered on tabloid covers. The day after announcing her break-up from Ellen DeGeneres in 2000, Anne Heche wandered around the Central Valley of California and stumbled into a Fresno home, introducing herself as “Celestia,” the daughter of God. Instead of retreating into the shadows, however, Heche wrote a revealing autobiography the next year titled Call Me Crazy, in which she revealed as a child she was sexually abused by her father. Heche said Celestia, her alternate personality, was a reaction to her mother’s refusal to acknowledge her father’s abuse. To overcome her demons, Heche said, “I went to a lot of therapy…I talked my head off and pounded enough pillows and confronted enough ghosts. I didn’t avoid the feelings of what my childhood was. I went right into them and went as deeply as I could.”
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Few pop stardom declines have been so frenziedly documented as Britney Spears’ meltdown and subsequent rehabilitation. After ex-husband Kevin Federline petitioned for sole custody of their two children, Spears had a short stay at an off-shore drug rehab in Antigua, but the next day came the infamous head-shaving incident in a Tarzana salon. Her behavior became increasingly erratic and the paparazzi was a constant presence documenting her around Los Angeles and her ins and outs of rehab. In January 2008, Spears was put under a psychiatric hold at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and her father was granted conservatorship over her estate. Later that month, under her psychiatrist’s orders, she was placed on a 5150 involuntary psychiatric hold at UCLA Medical Center and many believe she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but no confirmation has been made.
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In 1996, Kidder—who played Lois Lane to Christopher Reeve’s Superman—suffered a very public breakdown at the age of 47, disappearing for four days in what she called “the most public freak-out in history.” After three years of work on a memoir that vanished on her computer, Kidder descended into a manic state, ran off in Los Angeles and became a street person, wearing dirty clothes, and even losing her dental work in a matter of days. "I was like one of those ladies you see talking to the space aliens on the street corner in New York," she later confessed. Eight years earlier she was diagnosed with manic depression and refused to take lithium as treatment, but after her breakdown, Kidder accepted her diagnosis and made the road to recovery, and spoke out about her ordeal, saying, “"I'm saying this is the pattern of my life. In three years I might be having another wig-out. I have no idea. I just have to accept the fact that this is me, or I ain't gonna make it."
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The gorgeous star of Gone With the Wind had far from a picturesque life. She suffered from bipolar disorder, which wreaked havoc on her personal and professional life. After filming the 1945 movie Caesar and Cleopatra, Leigh had her first major breakdown after suffering a miscarriage and lashed out at then-husband Laurence Olivier. In 1953, she had another breakdown during the filming of Elephant Walk, often flying into rages on the set. Olivier admitted her to nursing homes, where she underwent electroshock treatments. Noel Coward wrote of her during that period, "Things had been bad and getting worse since 1948 or thereabouts." Olivier and Leigh divorced in 1960, and the actress who so memorably brought Blanche DuBois to life in A Streetcar Named Desire died from tuberculosis in 1967.
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