In 2000, you publicly announced that you had a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. Ten years later, do you think mental illnesses are more widely accepted and understood?

Carrie Fisher: I don’t know about understood. I think that unless you are forced to understand—unless it is an issue of yours—you wouldn’t bother to. I think that now most people know someone in their family that is coping with something, but there is still a tremendous amount of shame—that one is still regarded as a defective unit … if only they would pull up their bootstraps—they are only indulging their emotions, everybody’s moody, blah, blah, blah.

word.

read Carrie’s full interview here