BROOKE SHIELDS and Tom Cruise were locked in a “War of the Words” yesterday over the actress’s use of psychiatric treatment and prescription drugs when she suffered post-natal depression.

Shields, now playing Roxie Hart in Chicago in the West End, began her counter-attack against the Scientologist actor with an opinion piece in The New York Times.

“I feel compelled to speak not just for myself but also for the hundreds of thousands of women who have suffered from postpartum depression,” she wrote. “I’m going to take a wild guess and say that Mr Cruise has never suffered from postpartum depression.” Up to one in ten mothers can suffer from it.

Cruise, who adopted two children with his ex-wife, Nicole Kidman, condemned Shields’s use of antidepressants in a series of appearances to promote War of the Worlds, which earned $34.6 million (£19.5 million) on its first day of release, a record for one of his films.

Claiming to have helped people to conquer drug addictions with his controversial religion, he told the American Access Hollywood TV show that Shields should have used vitamins to combat her despair after childbirth. “You can use vitamins to help a woman through those things,” he said.

Questioned about his remarks a week ago on NBC’s Today show, Cruise broadened his attack to include the field of psychiatric medicine, a discipline that Scientology rejects.

“Psychiatry is a pseudo science,” Cruise told Matt Lauer, the programme’s host. “You don’t know the history of psychiatry. I do.”

In replying yesterday to Cruise, Shields wrote: “To suggest that I was wrong to take drugs to deal with my depression . . . shows an utter lack of understanding about postpartum depression and childbirth in general.”

The former child performer, who divorced the tennis player Andre Agassi in 1999, has written a memoir, Down Came the Rain, about her struggle with depression after the birth of her daughter, Rowan, two years ago. She is married to Chris Henchy, a TV scriptwriter.

She told yesterday how, instead of being overjoyed at the baby’s arrival, she was overwhelmed by feelings of doom. “At my lowest points, I thought of swallowing a bottle of pills or jumping out the window of my apartment,” she wrote.

Shields said that initially she was not happy to take Paxil, an antidepressant. “But the drugs, along with weekly therapy sessions, are what saved me — and my family,” she added.

Cruise’s attack on Shields comes as the Mission Impossible star becomes more open in proselytising for Scientology, an “applied religious philosophy” founded by the sciencefiction writer L. Ron Hubbard in the early 1950s.

Cruise dismissed his long-time publicist Pat Kingsley last year and replaced her with his sister, Lee Anne De Vette, also a Scientologist. Cruise’s fiancée, the Batman Begins star Katie Holmes, has said she is studying Scientology.

Mental illness

• Emil Kraeplin, a German doctor, was the founder of modern psychiatry. He classified schizophrenia and manic depression in the 1890s

  
  

• Annual cost of mental illness in the US is $1 billion

  
  

• Post-natal depression affects 10 to 15 per cent of mothers

  
  

• In the two years to 2002 there was a 68 per cent increase in the number of Prozac prescriptions to British children

  Sources: National Institute of Mental Health, National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, Netdoctor.co.uk, wikipedia

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