Cele|bitchy | Ashley Judd reveals her lousy treatment for depression

In this month’s issue of Glamour, Ashley Judd did her duty as a B-list celebrity and revealed potentially embarrassing details about her personal life. She said that she underwent in-patient treatment for depression after succumbing to pressure from employees at the facility that was treating her sister, country star Winona Judd, for a food addiction:

Ashley Judd says she spent 47 days in a Texas treatment facility for depression and other emotional problems, in an interview in Glamour magazine.

“I needed help,” the 38-year-old actress tells the magazine in its August issue. “I was in so much pain.”

Judd, the daughter of country music star Naomi Judd, says she entered the Shades of Hope Treatment Center in Buffalo Gap in February for “codependence in my relationships; depression, blaming, raging, numbing, denying and minimizing my feelings.”

“But because my addictions were behavioral, not chemical, I wouldn’t have known to seek treatment. At Shades of Hope, my behaviors were treated like addictions. And those behaviors were killing me spiritually, the same as someone who is sitting on a corner with a bottle in a brown paper bag.”

Judd says she was visiting her sister, singer Wynonna Judd, who was being treated for food addictions.

“When (the counselors) approached me about treatment, they said, `No one ever does an intervention on people like you. You look too good; you’re too smart and together. But you (and Wynonna) come from the same family so you come from the same wound.’ No one had ever validated my pain before. It was so profound,” she says.

It sounds like Judd was sold a bill of goods. Listen to how she explains “therapy:”
“My behaviors were treated like addictions. And those behaviors were killing me spiritually, the same as someone who is sitting on a corner with a bottle in a brown paper bag.”

This sounds like an oversimplified way to view one’s issues. There are lots of different schools of thought and accompanying therapies that can be effective, but treating everything like an addiction doesn’t seem like a very constructive way to work through one’s emotional issues.

If it worked for Judd that’s great though, and she deserves credit for being open and honest about what she went through.

Here is Ashley Judd at a Cartier party in early June with Salma Hayek, and at the Indianapolis 500 celebration in late May with her husband, Scottish racecar driver Dario Franchitti. Judd, 38, has been married to Franchitti, 33, since 1999. The couple divides their time between Tennessee and Scotland.