L.A. Times Profiles Kidder’s Battle With Mental Illness
Today's Los Angeles Times looks at actress Margot Kidder's fight against the stigma associated with mental illness. Kidder, who played Lois Lane in the "Superman" movies, last week received the Courage in Mental Health Award from the California Women's Mental Health Policy Council for "her courage in speaking out about mental illness." Kidder, who was diagnosed with manic depression, recounts her struggle to understand and come to terms with her illness to the Times. "After it was over, I totally understood the need to abolish the stigma attached to people with thought disorders," Kidder said. "Those people tend to be treated, even by psychiatrists, as separate from the population, rather than as a part of it, but with a problem. And that kind of isolation tends to amplify the fear, the insecurity, the terror that one cannot ever get well" (Levine, Los Angeles Times, 1/30).