ASHINGTON - Tipper Gore said yesterday that the type of ''shame and stigma'' she felt before seeking treatment for depression too often stops young people from getting help. She did not elaborate on her treatment and whether it continues.
A year after a White House conference on mental health that drew wide attention to her own experience, Gore helped launch an advertising campaign aimed at teenagers and young adults.
The wife of Vice President Al Gore, the likely Democratic presidential candidate, has said she was treated for clinical depression at some point after the 1989 car accident that nearly killed their son, Albert, then 6. She also has said the family sought counseling after the accident.
''I think I felt the same stigma that everybody feels, and that is that we treat diseases of the brain, illnesses of the brain, differently than other organs in the body,'' Tipper Gore said in an interview.
MTV will air three public service ads that urge young people to recognize mental problems in themselves or others, and to get help.
''For some reason there is more shame and stigma attached if you have that kind of an illness, and we want to eradicate that,'' she said. ''It's unfair and discriminatory and it's particularly unfair, I think, that young people feel this.''
The vice president and President Clinton have both praised her for going public with her treatment a year ago. It was an unusually personal revelation for Tipper Gore, who remains protective of her family's privacy despite decades in public life.
She has has been reluctant to elaborate on her situation, either by providing details of her initial treatment or discussing whether she has had related problems.
An aide cut off a question yesterday about whether there has been further treatment, and Gore did not address the issue. Later, spokeswoman Camille Johnston said Gore is not in treatment now. Johnston also said Gore ''would put her health first,'' to seek treatment if she felt she needed it now, even in the glare of her husband's campaign.
Gore pointed to suicide statistics among young people (it is their third-leading cause of death) and studies that show 51 million Americans suffer some sort of mental problem as evidence of the danger in denying or hiding mental illness.
