One More Thing Brad Pitt and George Clooney Have in Common

It’s not often we stumble onto something on the New York Post’s Page 6 that contributes to our understanding of mental health, but never say never. How could we resist this headline: Brad Pitt: ‘I was smoking way too much dope’? Turns out that the actor went through a period of being depressed, in the late 1990s, and talked about in an interview in the Hollywood Reporter.

“I got really sick of myself at the end of the 1990s. I was hiding out from the celebrity thing, I was smoking way too much dope, I was sitting on the couch and just turning into a doughnut and I really got irritated with myself,” he says. “I got to: ‘What’s the point? I know better than this.’ ”

Brad Pitt turning into a doughnut is a little hard to picture, but that’s the point: It’s immensely valuable to have a guy with just about everything imaginable going for him, not even counting Angelina Jolie as his partner, admit that he was seriously depressed. Depression doesn’t respect (or reflect on) your talents and assets; it can strike down the best and the brightest, including the sexiest man alive. In fact, two of the sexiest men alive: George Clooney also recently acknowledged his own bout with depression, the Post notes.”Clooney recently revealed his battle with hopeless feelings after being injured while making Syriana. Clooney told Rolling Stone in November that he considered suicide.”

We’d give you a link to that story, for more details, but it’s behind a paywall on the Rolling Stone site. At any rate, this is the kind of admission that has the potential to help other people acknowledge their own profoundly negative feelings, especially teenage boys. Seriously depressed adolescent boys who are hiding their pain are the most at risk for suicide, Dr. Alan Apter notes in this video, and what they need most, he says, is role models who make it clear that it isn’t unmanly to acknowledge dark feelings.