I always have a weird reaction to hearing about a celebrity who is struggling with mental illness. I feel pity and empathy, but I also feel something akin to satisfaction. As I said, it's weird, at least on the surface.

The satisfaction is partly due, I think, to the knowledge that I'm not alone in my fight with depression. Not that I thought I was, but since we all feel that we "know" celebrities to some extent through media coverage, it's more like finding out a friend or acquaintance is dealing with it rather than just seeing impersonal statistics of how many people have depression or another mental illness.

When I read about actor Owen Wilson's apparent suicide attempt over the weekend, my reaction quickly became pity for the poor guy, unmitigated by any hint of satisfaction. Because of his popularity, I assume, as well as the fact that he had seemed to be very stable, the media has jumped all over the story like nothing I've seen in a long time.

Family-based therapy works better than individual supportive therapy in treating teenagers with bulimia, a study published yesterday suggests.

In the study, in the September issue of The Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers randomly assigned 80 adolescents to receive 20 sessions over six months of family therapy or supportive treatment. There were no differences between the two groups in the number of sessions attended. But five in the family group and four from the supportive group dropped out of treatment.

The number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003, researchers report today in the most comprehensive study of the controversial diagnosis.

Experts say the number has almost certainly risen further since 2003.

Many experts theorize that the jump reflects that doctors are more aggressively applying the diagnosis to children, and not that the incidence of the disorder has increased.

But the magnitude of the increase surprises many psychiatrists. They say it is likely to intensify the debate over the validity of the diagnosis, which has shaken child psychiatry.

War, poverty and diseases such as AIDS are adding to mental health problems in poorer countries, which are generally ill-equipped to respond to depression, schizophrenia and other such ailments, according to health officials.

Experts say that has to change.

On Tuesday, health officials called for new strategies and more money to treat the mentally ill in the developing world in a special issue of the British medical journal, The Lancet. Unless mental health treatment becomes widely available, the futures of poor countries will be handicapped, the writers argue.