Angelina Jolie Mental Illness

It is estimated that Angelina Jolie checked into the Neuropsychiatric Institute in the late 1990′s due to self-reported suicidal and homicidal ideation.

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To be more specific, Angelina was diagnosed with presumptive Borderline Personality Disorder which in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness (DSM-IV) for is an Axis II Personality Disorder. Axis I diagnoses are mostly mood disorders and can be transient (i.e. major depressive disorder, adjustment disorder, etc). Axis II disorders are considered to be characterological disorders, more ingrained and ego-syntonic and therefore, more difficult to "change."

According to psychologists, there are a few people with BPD who do get better and stop doing crazy and self-destructive things. Probably motherhood and adopting Maddox helped her to pull herself together.  Angelina now appears to have found a "bigger purpose" and is not acting out with drugs, etc. On the other hand, the truth is that many of these patients are vulnerable to stress and loss. Grief or any loss tends to run a more complicated course with people who have "Borderline Personality Disorder". 

It has to be mentioned that Jolie has revealed she was hospitalized by her choice at a particularly chaotic time in her life. That was almost ten yeas ago but now she obviously found new and more adaptive ways to deal with old demons.

Just in case you wonder what Angelina Jolie has stated about her mental illness, check out below for more details...

In June 2001 Angelina Jolie revealed to Rolling Stone magazine that during her very early teens she began "thinking about not wanting to be around. It was when the reality of life set in, the reality of surviving." Also, Angelina used to hurt herself during her early teens but stopped around the age of sixteen. 

In 2000 Angelina explained in Maxim magazine:  "You’re young, you’re crazy, you’re in bed and you’ve got knives. So shit happens." But in 1999 Access Hollywood interview she explained it in more detail: "I was..trying to feel something….I was looking at different things..thinking romantically about…about blood. I really hurt myself," and also she was quoted as saying: "I was just….a kid. I was like 13, And, I was saying that it is not something that is cool. It's not cool. And I understand that it is a cry for help…"

In a 2000 Jane interview Angelina Jolie stated: "This person asked me about cutting myself when they saw a scar. I’m very open, but because of that, people think that they know everything about me, and, actually, they don’t know anything. I say things that other people might go through. That’s what artists should do - throw things out there and not be perfect and not have answers for anything and see if people understand. But this person made the cutting sound interesting, like it was something I do now. And then I met somebody who said they’d seen movies of mine and then showed me where they had cut themselves. I had to explain, first off, not to do that. But it made me really f... angry at the people who represent me in a way that would get that person to do that and show me. I don’t understand why people would want to use something so damaging. It’s like, let’s make me look "cool" and worry a lot of people in my family."

When Angelina Jolie was asked about suicidal tendencies, she admitted: "Yeah. I was in a New York hotel room."








In fact, Jolie was going to use a knife and sleeping pills. In preparation, she wrote a note for the housekeeper asking her to call the police, so that the housekeeper wouldn’t have to suffer the distress of finding her body. Then Jolie spent the day walking around. She almost bought a kimono, then she realized how crazy that was. "I didn’t know if I could pull the final thing across my wrists" Jolie reveals.  But it was the sleeping pill part of the equation that stopped her, at least on a practical level. Worried that she didn’t have enough, she had asked her mother to mail her some more and she realized that her mother would feel responsible. She realized something else, too: "That we can make that decision any time. And I kind of lay there with myself and thought: "You might as well live a lot, really hard, and not give a shit, because you can always walk through that door." So I started to live as if I could die any day."

There were times Angelina hit rock bottom. In her own words: "This is going to sound so insane, but there was a time when I realized I was going to have to hire somebody to kill me. It comes from a place of … With suicide comes the guilt of all the people around you thinking that they could have done something. With somebody being murdered, nobody takes some kind of guilty responsibility."

Later Jolie adds: "I am fragile and f... up. There are lots of things about my life in recent years that people don’t know anything about. People assume . . . People have said things about me, they’ve said I’ve slept with my brother, they’ve said that I’m a drug addict and that all I do is get f... up, and they’ve also made it seem like I’m some s... I’m far from perfect as a person ….." She shakes her head.

It has to be noted that before she and Billy Bob Thornton got married, she was sectioned for seventy-two hours at UCLA. "What happened is we didn’t know if we were going to be able to be together. I remember him driving somewhere and not knowing if he was OK…. We had wanted to get married and then for all these different reasons we thought we couldn’t. We both were just … are just, it’s a beautiful kind of love, but it’s also a little insane, and I for some reason thought something had happened to him and I lost the ability to … I just went a little insane" Jolie reveals.

In the past a British tabloid newspaper has published images of a video which allegedly shows Angelina Jolie in a "drug den" with a woman who is openly smoking heroin. Angelina is shown in video photos published in The Sun newspaper looking disheveled and wide-eyed as she smokes a cigarette and tells the camera of her past drug use. The video captures Jolie  reportedly stating:  "I’ve done coke, heroin, ecstasy, LSD, everything."

The National Enquirer reported that a videotape of Jolie allegedly smoking and snorting heroin had been offered for sale for $70,000. But in this footage, possibly taken in the 1990s when she was in her 20s, Jolie does not take drugs, telling the camera: "I gave them up long ago."

Conclusion: Motherhood has apparently helped Jolie a lot. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to claim that being a mother has literally saved her life. Angelina is undeniably very lucky because there are a lot of borderlines who completely broke down after becoming parents.



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