This post is part of Celebrity Health Week at the b5media Health & Wellness Channel. For more information about Celebrity Health Week posts here at Mental Health Notes, visit Introducing Celebrity Health Week: Celebrities And Mental Illness.

In this Celebrity Health Week post, we’ll take a look at some celebrities who have obsessive-compulsive disorder – or had, in the case of the deceased. We’ll look at actors and actresses, musicians, writers, political figures, and other well-known figures.

Please note that I am not an authority on celebrities and mental illness. For a celebrity to be on this list, either he or or she or a spouse or reliable family member must have publicly discussed – verbally or otherwise – his or her mental illness, or, in the case of the deceased, professionals must have addressed it later on.

Read on!

Back in March, I wrote Celebrities With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Smile For The Camera! as part of the I Must Shave My Legs: The OCD Miniseries here at Mental Health Notes.

While it would be a bit redundant to re-list those famous people with OCD, I will point you in the direction of a few Web sites that go into detail about each celebrity’s obsessions and compulsions or offer a few more names to add to the list of celebrities with OCD:

• 12 Obsessive Celebs – A Life Less Disorder-nary
• Here to Help: Famous People with OCD
• OCD in the Media
• Celebrities with OCD
• Obsessive-Compulsive Foundation: In the Media

Stay tuned for information about obsessive-compulsive disorder, political figures and mental illness, and celebrities and suicide.

Image: Newscom

Post from: Blisstree

Celebrities And Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Back in February I told you all about the Mental Health America 2008 Media Awards. These awards honor news and feature stories of mental health issues in print, online, and broadcast media and on national, state, and student levels.

Well, Mental Health America has announced the winners, and will honor them Saturday, June 7, 2008:

Mental Health America will honor twelve professional and student journalists for outstanding coverage of mental health issues tomorrow at a Media Awards luncheon held during its Inaugural Mental Health Promotion and Prevention Summit in Washington, D.C.

The categories and winners include:

• Local Television: WTHR (Indianapolis, IN), “Help Me, I’m Dying,” by Anne Marie Tiernon
• National Television: Keeping Kids Healthy/WNET (New York, NY), “Childhood-Onset Schizophrenia – A Life Interrupted,” by Susan Berger Sabreen, Rich Sabreen, Anja Baron and A. Thomas Tebbens
• Local Radio: WNYC (New York, NY), “Cities Embrace New Ways to Handle Confrontations Between Cops and the Mentally Ill,” by Arun Venugopal
• Advice Columns: The Palm Beach Post, “Kicking Depression” Weekly Column, by Christine Stapleton
• Local/Regional Magazines: Dallas Child, “Diagnosing Joey: Unraveling the Mysteries of Pediatric Bipolar Disorder,” by Jenny B. Davis and Shelley Hawes Pate
• National Magazines: Ladies’ Home Journal, “Broken Promise,” by David France and Diane Salvatore
• Newspapers with a Circulation Below 100,000: East Valley Tribune (Phoenix, AZ), “Pam’s Story,” by Mary K. Reinhart and Patti Epler
• Newspapers with a Circulation Above 100,000: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Hidden Shame” Series, by Alan Judd and Andy Miller
• Students Journalism: Columbia Missourian/Associated Press, “Looking for a Way Home,” by Jennifer Whitney
• Photo Essay: The Los Angeles Times, “Breakdown: A Family’s Struggle with Mental Illness,” by Robert Gauthier
• National Reporting: The Nation, Series on the “Personality Disorder” Scandal, by Joshua Kors
• Timely Coverage of a Mental Health Issue: The Wall Street Journal, “The Price of Privacy” Series, by Elizabeth Bernstein and John Blanton

Congratulations to all the winners!

If you think you have what it takes for the Mental Health America Media Awards, Mental Health America will begin distributing nomination guides near the beginning of 2009 for the next awards. You can subscribe to their email list to stay up to date.

Image: Newscom

Air is currently rockin’ out in the This Is Why I ROCK! series here at Mental Health Notes. If you have a mental illness and are still living the life you love, head on over the the official announcement post and enter!

Post from: Blisstree

Winners Of The Mental Health America 2008 Media Awards

This week, which was also Children’s Mental Health Week, was fairly busy at Mental Health Notes. I talked about mental health situations in the news (some…bizarre, and some not so uncommon) as well as well as a few mental health studies such as increasing intelligence and how compliments affect the brain. I told you about NAMI and the DBSA participating in the online Women’s Health Expo, how my local NAMI’s cookout for Mental Health Month panned out, and even shared a few extreme ups and downs I experienced this week. Perhaps most noteworthy, however, is that Ken Jensen took over the This Is Why I ROCK! series slot for the next week!

My bookmarks are overflowing with mental health news-, research-, and government-related information. The Pentagon is working to reduce mental health counseling stigma (I wonder if this decision was made before or after VA mental health director Dr. Ira Katz sent around an internal email dealing with suicide data that had “Shh!” in the subject line?). Researchers in Canada believe celebrities are one reason the number of young people who visit mental health professionals has doubled in the last two years (well, that certainly adds to Tuesday’s conversation about celebrities and mental health), while researchers in Australia believe helping pregnant women cope with depression during pregnancy may lower the risk of being depressed after giving birth. And, sadly, another mental health care budget slash is in the works; this time, in California’s Santa Clara County.

And, as usual, the rest of the b5 Health & Wellness Channel has a slue of stuff going on. In addition to Mental Health Notes’s birthday giveaway, Grace at Kids Health Notes currently has five giveaways going on (some end tonight, so hurry on over!) while Gloria at Cancer Commentary is running an HPV Awareness contest. In addition to the upcoming Living with Pain blog carnival, Help My Hurt’s Marijke has interviewed the author of How-To Marijuana, A Step-by-Step Guide to Medical Marijuana and is hosting a contest to win a free copy of the book. And, for you poets out there, Angelique at Breaking the Mirror is hosting a contest for a free copy of For Keeps: Women Tell the Truth about Their Bodies, Growing Older, and Acceptance. Of course, just when you thought we b5 bloggers didn’t know how to do anything but give stuff away, Gabrielle at Fertility Notes gets serious with tips for coping with fertility problems while Elaine at Genetics & Health the connections between child abuse, genetic changes, and suicide.

That’s all the sanity I can stand this Saturday! Remember, if you have any Saturday Sanity-worthy stories, send ‘em my way for next week.

Top image courtesy of morgueFile.
Middle and bottom images courtesy of Newscom.

Post from: Blisstree

Saturday Sanity: Ain’t The A Kick In The Brain?