• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Jim Carrey: Depression Expert

KateHL

Graduate Poster
K
Joined
Nov 21, 2007
Messages
1,822
Jim Carrey, lovable actor whom we came to know and love from works such as In Living Color, Dumb and Dumber and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, has taken on a new cause. What's that, you ask? He seems to fancy himself an expert and advocate for depression and believes vitamins are all that are needed to treat it!

'I think there's a whole new way of healing depression that doesn't require drugs, but using supplements instead,' he says, 'I'm writing a book about it.'
Click to expand...

I realize this article is from a less-than-excellent source but it's all over the internet and seems legitimate. He's said to be coming out with a book on the subject which I find unsettling at best. His partner is Jenny McCartney who believes vaccines are linked with autism and if this article is to be believed he is chin-deep in woo, himself. A lot of people, for reasons I cannot fathom, assign expert status to these celebrities when they give testimony on subjects that are far beyond their area of expertise. To me, that is incredibly dangerous ... almost to a criminal degree. I don't understand why people listen to them and I don't understand how they get published.

Thoughts?
 
Last edited:
A lot of people hold celebrities in very high esteem, and assume that they get they best advice that money can buy. This is, of course, complete cobblers, but a lot of people aren't very smart.
 
Allow me to ask the obvious question. What the hell does Jim Carrey have to be depressed about? I know I'd probably be a lot less depressed if I were someone like Jim Carrey (sans gullibility). I might even be able to treat the rest of it with vitamins!
:mgduh
 
A lot of people hold celebrities in very high esteem, and assume that they get they best advice that money can buy. This is, of course, complete cobblers, but a lot of people aren't very smart.

Freaky double post!!

Check the time stamps!
 
Last edited:
As a skeptic, I try not to ridicule anything (well almost anything) in advance without hearing what a person has to say provided of course that he his words are backed up with proper and respectable scientific proof.
If Jim Carey can provide the proper scientific peer reviewed proof then maybe he's on to something.
 
Silentknight said:
Allow me to ask the obvious question. What the hell does Jim Carrey have to be depressed about? I know I'd probably be a lot less depressed if I were someone like Jim Carrey (sans gullibility). I might even be able to treat the rest of it with vitamins!
:mgduh
Click to expand...
Well, to be fair, depression isn't always situational and it doesn't have to follow a pattern. Anybody can be depressed (mildly, moderately or severely, acutely or chronically). :)
 
Kate is right. Many people suffer depression even if logically they do not have a reason to.
 
KateHW said:
Jim Carrey, lovable actor whom we came to know and love from works such as In Living Color, Dumb and Dumber and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, has taken on a new cause. What's that, you ask? He seems to fancy himself an expert and advocate for depression and believes vitamins are all that are needed to treat it!



I realize this article is from a less-than-excellent source but it's all over the internet and seems legitimate. He's said to be coming out with a book on the subject which I find unsettling at best. His partner is Jenny McCartney who believes vaccines are linked with autism and if this article is to be believed he is chin-deep in woo, himself. A lot of people, for reasons I cannot fathom, assign expert status to these celebrities when they give testimony on subjects that are far beyond their area of expertise. To me, that is incredibly dangerous ... almost to a criminal degree. I don't understand why people listen to them and I don't understand how they get published.

Thoughts?
Click to expand...

I've beaten insomnia and depression with B vitamin and various natural supplements. I originally went to a psychiatrist years ago, and after about a 5 minute interview he put me on Zoloft. I stopped taking it, and I'm glad I did. Most of the stuff big pharma pushes is poison.
 
Tippit said:
I've beaten insomnia and depression with B vitamin and various natural supplements. I originally went to a psychiatrist years ago, and after about a 5 minute interview he put me on Zoloft. I stopped taking it, and I'm glad I did. Most of the stuff big pharma pushes is poison.
Click to expand...
No, I'm sorry, but it isn't. Poison is poison. I'm sorry you had an incompetent doctor who didn't listen to you long enough to make an accurate judgment call based on your needs but based on what you just said that sounds much more accurate than 'Most of the stuff big pharma pushes is poison.' Of course, not every case of depression needs to be treated with medicine. We're not sure what you experienced, but if you were to write a book telling people to give up drug therapy in favor of B vitamin and supplements that would be incredibly irresponsible of you.
 
It would work if you were depressed about not having enough useless pills to take.

Or if his movie "The Majestic" drained your body of essential vitamins....
 
It's ironic that Carrey is somewhat against Scientology (who of course also prescribe vitamins, but for drug abuse rather than depression), when between he and his wife Jenny McCarthy they form their very own little pseudoscience woo machine.
 
JIm Carrey and his slu77y new girlfriend are all about the alternatives. Completely uneducated in this area, they are being paraded around by antivaccinators much the same way Cruise is paraded around by scientology.

Celebrity endorsements baby. Celebs are eye candy and people think they know stuff for some reason. Even that rat Oprah had Mccarthy on her show. She's much s3xier than fisher, and is already a celeb, so people listen to her even more.

All the old debunked information is new again. Wheee.

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/02/autism_vaccines_and_ghouls.php

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=9
 
http://www.autism-watch.org/about/bio2.shtml

The final step in my awakening came during a Disneyland vacation. My younger son was still on a gluten- and casein-free diet, which we both swore had been a significant factor in his improvement. We had lugged at least 40 pounds of special food on the plane with us. In an unwatched moment, he snatched a waffle and ate it. We watched with horror and awaited the dramatic deterioration of his condition that the “experts” told us would inevitably occur. The results were astounding—absolutely nothing happened.

I began to suspect that I had been very foolish.
In the following months, we stopped every [alternative] treatment except speech and occupational therapy for both boys. They did not deteriorate and, in fact, continued to improve at the same rate as before—or faster. Our bank balance improved, and the circles under our eyes started to fade. And quite frankly, I began to get mad at myself for being so gullible and for misleading other parents of autistic children.

Looking back on my experiences with "alternate" autism therapies, they seem almost unreal, like Alice's adventures in Wonderland. Utter nonsense treated like scientific data, people nodding in sage agreement with blatant contradictions, and theories made out of thin air and unrelated facts—and all of it happening happening right here and now, not in some book. Real people are being deceived and hurt, and there won't be a happy ending unless enough of us get together and write one.
Click to expand...
 
I expect his advice will go something like this: "Whenever I get depressed, I just go into my giant room full of money and swim around in it. You should try it! All you need to do is make a couple hit movies like I did. Then, whenever you feel down, you can just imagine your millions and that worry will wash away."
 
How do you know your 'cure' from insomnia and depression wasn't just the placebo effect? You took charge of your own problems by taking a vitamin and then you felt better. Read Natural Causes. Excellent book on the supplement industry.
 
Last edited:
KateHW said:
I realize this article is from a less-than-excellent source but it's all over the internet and seems legitimate. He's said to be coming out with a book on the subject which I find unsettling at best. His partner is Jenny McCartney who believes vaccines are linked with autism and if this article is to be believed he is chin-deep in woo, himself. A lot of people, for reasons I cannot fathom, assign expert status to these celebrities when they give testimony on subjects that are far beyond their area of expertise. To me, that is incredibly dangerous ... almost to a criminal degree. I don't understand why people listen to them and I don't understand how they get published.

Thoughts?
Click to expand...

Maybe it's an issue of control? When we see celebrities (who we assume aren't any more skilled or knowledgeable than we are) able to grasp a complicated topic and present it in an understandable manner, it allows us to feel like we could do the same - that expertise isn't out of our reach? (Plus all the usual fallacies - if we find the person presenting the information likable we are more likely to trust it, we look to confirm what we already believe, etc.)

Linda
 
Lisa Simpson said:
How do you know your 'cure' from insomnia and depression wasn't just the placebo effect? You took charge of your own problems by taking a vitamin and then you felt better. Read Natural Causes. Excellent book on the supplement industry.
Click to expand...

Lisa, Lisa. You shouldn't have done that. Tippit will now learn all about placeboes; get depressed and be unable to sleep again, :mad: :D
 
Lisa Simpson said:
How do you know your 'cure' from insomnia and depression wasn't just the placebo effect? You took charge of your own problems by taking a vitamin and then you felt better. Read Natural Causes. Excellent book on the supplement industry.
Click to expand...

Not only that, but some meds were taken. I took three different antidepressants before I found the one that didn't make me sweat and did work well. The whole time I also took other supplements and vitamins. I finally stopped all the other supplements excpept iron and a daily multivitamin. I kept taking the antidepressants for a number of years until I no longer felt that dark cloud over me.

I still take the iron and a multivitamin. I don't credit them with "curing" me.

Sometimes if we don't feel well for whatever reason, we end up not taking care of ourselves. We could get malnourished. I would never credit getting nourished as a miracle cure, just with getting me back to normal. I wouldn't discount the effects any other medicine had on me either. I never knew what it was like to not be depressed until I took the antidepressant for those years. Taking my vitamins now may keep me physically healthy-including my brain, but I never discount the fact that I could get depressed again. I needed a bandaid to get healthy, and now know how to maintain my health to help prevent the depression from occuring again.

So take the vitamin to maintain your health and as a preventive measure, but don't totally discount meds for everyone or even yourself.

Calling meds poison on a limited experience is not fair to everyone else that benefits from meds. (I could point to Brooke Shields as another that has been helped by meds in spite of being told by Cruise that it was unnecessary).
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom