Awful Mirror article about Catherine Zeta Jones

I picked up a copy of the Daily Mirror yesterday with interest as I saw the headline "ZETA IN MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC - 5 DAY STAY TO TREAT BIPOLAR"

Firstly I would like to offer my best wishes to my compatriot Catherine Zeta Jones (CZJ) who the article is about. I hope that she recovers quickly.

Part of me thinks this is wonderful that the mental health problems of another celebrity have been exposed and that hopefully this will help to normalise mental health problems and get people talking about them. 

The article isn't particularly negative like some we have seen in the tabloids, however I thought it was awful. It was naive and its author Simon Boyle demonstrated to the world his lack of understanding.

It makes out that CZJ has developed the condition due to the stress of her husband Michael Douglas undergoing treatment for cancer. Now I'm sure this has been a stressful time and it may well have brought on her current problems but bipolar disorder is an underlying medical condition which she has probably been dealing with for a long, long time. It is not something that is caused by stress, although stress may make symptoms worse. 

The Mirror article also makes it seem that bipolar is something that can be treated in 5 days if you get the right treatment. This is blatantly not the case and I wonder what impact this dumbing down of what can be a seriously debilitating condition has on ordinary people with bipolar.

Since yesterday there has been a lot written online and in the papers about her condition. She has come out herself and talked about her struggle to live with the condition over a number of years. Well done Catherine, this will help people understand mental health conditions better and hopefully overcome some of the associated stigma. I still can't help but feel disappointed by the original article on the front page of yesterday's Daily Mirror though. To be fair to the Mirror it was the only paper I saw yesterday and I'm sure other papers made similar mistakes.

A longer and amended (not so bad now) version of the Mirror article that was on the front page yesterday is on their website. 

Lots of people have suggested that CZJ has made this public to self-publicise and it does make me wonder. Andrea Woodside has written an interesting blog about this subject on the Time to Change website.