Celebrities Who Were Institutionalized

Checking in the loony bin to get help for mental illness can be a double-edged sword. On one side you are improving your chances of bouncing back. On the other side people denigrate you for being so much as associated with a mental facility.
When famous persons get committed to a mental institution, this inconvenience is multiplied tenfold. Their immediate social circles are not the only one in the know; the entire planet is. Before long the blogosphere is already roasting them alive. This is how fame collects its dues.
Fame may have brought these celebrities there in the first place. Mental conditions seem to dovetail well with popularity, as many people in this list would demonstrate.

Britney Spears

2007 – pop culture pundits remember this as the year Britney Spears literally went lady gaga. Coming from a divorce the year before, the pop superstar cranked up the crazy and shaved her head. It has been a downward spiral since.
In 2008 Spears finally checked into the psychiatric ward of the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. The weeklong meds there may have done her some good as she released a well-received album later that year.

Carrie Fisher

No one would have thought Carrie Fisher’s nerves would be having a Star Wars of their own. Decades after her star turn in that saga, Carrie Fisher latched on to drugs and alcohol to treat a looming insanity.
At 40, she finally entered a mental institution for bipolar disorder. There, she would not sleep for days on end and think persons on the TV screen were directly talking to her.
With the right meds however, she was able to turn her life around. To this day, the erstwhile Princess Leia is undergoing treatment, including electroshock therapy.

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James Taylor

James Taylor is unique in this list for positively seeing through his nine-month stay in the funny farm. He even sounds grateful for it on his hit song “Fire and Rain.” Apparently the stay kept him from serving in the Vietnam War, thereby saving him.
James was near graduating from high school when a deep depression set in, forcing him into Massachusetts’ McLean Hospital in 1965. Making the most of his time there, he continued studying through the facility’s partner school, Arlington.

Joey Ramone

Punk rock king Joey Ramone endured schizophrenia and social anxiety while growing up. But he did not enter a mental hospital for years – until he brandished a knife at his mother and sibling. He remained there for a month.
In the years thereafter, Joey reformed himself as a rock god, worshipped by thousands of sad boys like him.

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Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe was as famous for her feeble mental state as she was for her blonde bimbo act. In hindsight it was her genes that directed her fate. Her mother also has a mental illness and perished during institutionalization.
Historians know Marilyn grew sick of being used like a rag by men in high places. She also yearned to be treated right by Hollywood, to be given roles that showcased her acting range. In 1961, a doctor misled her into checking into a mental hospital, the very place she was scared of.
Life was not any better after she got out. Men in power continued passing her around until her untimely demise.

Margot Kidder

Fans of the Superman movies would never forget that scene in which a nutty, nude Lois Lane hides around a woodpile.
In a curious case of life imitating the art, the actress who portrayed her, Margot Kidder, was committed to a mental facility in 1996 for manic depression.

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Vivien Leigh

Vivien Leigh’s legendary beauty belies her brain’s disarray. Even during the peak years of her popularity, she languished in manic depression. But no one in the movie-going public had any idea. Doctors were notorious then for covering mental illnesses up and employing crude treatments for them.
Vivien was winning Academy Awards even as the mental disease continued hounding her. It came to a head with an admission to a mental facility plus sessions of electroshock therapy. Hollywood urban legend has it that the sessions burned parts of her head.

Winona Ryder

Her 1990 stint in a mental hospital foreshadowed her performance in 1999’s Girl, Interrupted. Exhausted, anxious and depressed, at a time when she had just withdrawn from The Godfather: Part III cast, Winona was institutionalized.
She checked out after only a few weeks. In interviews afterwards, she said her confinement was for naught, that it offered nothing in the way of denouement to her troubles. Years later, Winona was embroiled in a shoplifting incident.

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Yoko Ono

John Lennon’s paramour attempted suicide after divorcing her first husband in the US. Yoko’s parents were so concerned they returned her to Japan to be institutionalized.
She remarried afterwards but that relationship also went up in flames, although not before it gave her a bundle of joy.

Get lucky few to 100

A woman in Bainbridge, Ohio celebrates her 100th birthday in June. (AP Photo/Paul Vernon)

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff:

Some studies, as a health reporter, I wish I could ignore -- like the one published this week showing that diet, exercise, and other lifestyle choices don’t make a darn bit of difference in getting people to the 100-year mark and beyond.
“Tell me I’m missing something,” I begged the study co-author, Dr. Nir Barzilai, who heads the Institute of Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “There has to be something that centenarians were doing right!”
He tells me, no, they simply won the genetic lottery, having the good fortune of being born to families that age slower than the rest of us. “But this population is just 1 out of 10,000,“ Barzilai explained. “They’re not us, the poor people who don’t have genes to protect us from smoking, lack of exercise, and a poor diet.”
The study, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, did find that men who made it to the century mark were somewhat less likely to have smoked: Nearly 60 percent of them smoked compared with 75 percent of their counterparts in the control group who lived an average lifespan. But women centenarians were just as likely to have smoked as their shorter-living peers.
And when it came to other lifestyle factors -- exercise, diet, body weight, alcohol intake -- the centenarians didn’t differ from their peers. The researchers asked them to recall their general health habits back when they were 70 and then compared the results to the prevalence of these behaviors in people who were born in the same year, as recorded in government surveys a few decades earlier, around the same time the centenarians were 70.
“Sure we asked them to remember back 30 years, but these were general questions,” said Barzilai. “Did you smoke, did you exercise, were you on any special diet?”
The centenarians -- all of whom were Eastern European Jews -- would have recalled, he added, if they had been tri-athletes or had spent their retirement living on yogurt and meditation. “Some of them swore it was the chicken schmalz that kept them healthy!”
But it wasn’t the chicken fat or anything else within their control but rather, Barzilai believes, the longevity genes carried by these individuals that countered the effects of any disease-associated genes they also inherited. (The fact that they were all Ashkenazi Jews could limit the applicability of the findings to others.)






“Those who live to 100 get heart disease, dementia, and cancer, but they get them much later in life than the rest of us,” Barzilai explained. “Research suggests their whole aging process is slower.”
In terms of practical application, I’d like to know whether I should quit running and eat burgers for lunch instead of blackberries mixed with Greek yogurt. After all, if I’m destined to live past the century mark, it won’t help me get there -- nor will it help me get to 100 if it’s not in my genetic cards.
While that may be true, Barzilai said, lifestyle factors do play a prominent role in determining how well we age and how long we’ll live within the range that's set by our genes. My 67-year-old father, for example, is much healthier than his own father was at his age, most likely because, unlike his father, he never smoked.
And studies in genetically varied populations of Seventh Day Adventists -- who don’t smoke, follow a vegetarian diet, and believe strongly in exercise and social networks -- have shown that they live an average of eight years longer than their neighbors who don’t practice the religion.
“I can’t tell anyone to relax their good lifestyle habits based on our study of centenarians,” Barzilai said. And if you are lucky enough to have really old folks in your family, realize that it doesn’t guarantee you have those protective genes. It just gives you better odds.
“Unfortunately,” he added, “we don’t know until we reach our 80s or 90s whether we were lucky enough to get these genes or not.”

Lindsay Lohan Talks House Arrest With Life & Style

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles prosecutors say Lindsay Lohan will return to court Thursday so a judge can consider whether she violated her probation while serving house arrest.
District Attorney's spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons says Lohan's case is expected to be called at 10 a.m., but no other details were available. She says her office has not received any documents laying out the specific allegations against the 24-year-old actress.
Her spokesman Steve Honig says he could not comment on the hearing.
Lohan has been on house arrest since last month. She had been expected to serve 35 days of a four-month sentence for violating her probation on a 2007 drunken driving case by taking a necklace from a store without permission.
Lohan resolved the theft case with a no contest plea in May.