Celebrity bipolar sufferer Linda Hamilton has her family doctor to thank for balancing out her erratic moodswings after he spotted manic depression as she played a schizophrenic in a movie.

THE TERMINATOR star knew she was mixed up as she struggled to juggle her career and family life after splitting from director husband James Cameron, but she had no idea she was a manic depressive.

She recalls, "I had just left Jim and moved out of Jim's house with my young baby, so I had two young children and I was getting ready to play a multiple personality in a film.

"We had 10 nannies - one sort of more awful than the next. Most of them quit. After losing the 10th nanny and getting ready to play this part in a movie - and I was having a terrible postpartum depression with my second child - I just was a mess.

"My family physician had seen a lot of the evidence of the strain what I was going through and he saw that I was in trouble. It all broke at about that time."

Her doctor prescribed her anti-depressant Prozac, and Hamilton has never looked back.

18/11/2004 08:59