Brooke Shields is awesome!

Many people are insulted and upset when movie stars pretend to be experts on all matters political, economic, scientific. And often, people have a point. Cultural icons have every right—nay, duty—to participate in civic discourse, but they should stop short of claiming to be experts just because they read a couple of posts at Powerline or the Daily Kos.

Or, in the case in point, because they browsed through a couple of sci-fi novels.

Exhibit A—Hollywood star with no medical training and who, despite a recent much-noted spiral into madness, has never suffered from post-partum depression (on account of being male, presumably) offers ridiculous advice to new mothers everywhere.

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Cruise: But what happens, the antidepressant, all it does is mask the problem. There's ways, [with] vitamins and through exercise and various things... I'm not saying that that isn't real. That's not what I'm saying. That's an alteration of what I'm saying. I'm saying that drugs aren't the answer, these drugs are very dangerous. They're mind-altering, antipsychotic drugs. And there are ways of doing it without that so that we don't end up in a brave new world. The thing that I'm saying about Brooke is that there's misinformation, okay. And she doesn't understand the history of psychiatry. She doesn't understand in the same way that you don't understand it, Matt.

Yes, I suppose that anti depressants are "mind-altering, antipsychotic drugs." But I figure that, if you're feeling psychotic, you might want to alter your mind, you know, to get to a non-psychotic state. Just a thought. But let's carry on...

Exhibit B—Hollywood star who is actually a mother and has actually suffered from post-partum depression takes the star previously marked as "Exhibit A" to task. And she comes up with a witty title to her column, subtly poking fun at Exhibit A's current film.

While Mr. Cruise says that Mr. Lauer and I do not "understand the history of psychiatry," I'm going to take a wild guess and say that Mr. Cruise has never suffered from postpartum depression.
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And comments like those made by Tom Cruise are a disservice to mothers everywhere. To suggest that I was wrong to take drugs to deal with my depression, and that instead I should have taken vitamins and exercised shows an utter lack of understanding about postpartum depression and childbirth in general.

If any good can come of Mr. Cruise's ridiculous rant, let's hope that it gives much-needed attention to a serious disease.

You rock, Brooke! I mean, uh, "Exhibit B"...!