September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. And in the world we live in now, the subject of mental health is still considered to be quite shameful, when, in reality, is increasingly more frequent in people’s lives.
Some women who are a part of today’s pop culture, however, are very open about their own mental health, and use their voices to make it a normal topic to talk about, not only in September, but all year round, just like it should be.
- dodie
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Singer, songwriter, YouTuber and author, dodie clark is and has always been very open about her mental health on her YouTube videos, songs, interviews, and social media accounts. She has derealisation, which is, basically, chronic dissociation, it’s when your brain disconnects from reality as a way to cope. It’s not a well-known mental health condition, but, according to dodie, it is the third most common mental health symptom, after depression and anxiety.
And even though she only found out the name in 2016, this has always been the way her “brain has dealt with high amounts of stress”, therefore, it has been a part of her life, and her work, from the start. In her song “When”, she talks about her struggles with mental health and in “Secret For The Mad” the lyrics encourage people to persevere through mental illness.
Fun fact: dodie is a big fan of the movie La La Land, and has a tattoo with a lyric from the song “Audition (The Fools Who Dream)”: “a bit of madness is key.” Which reminds her that her “pain can be used to make art, because it feels good to give it a purpose”, so she can feel more in control of it.
- J.K. Rowling
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Rowling has always been very open about having suffered depression in her twenties while writing the first Harry Potter book. At the time, she was living in Portugal and had just been through a divorce. The author had to move back to Britain, where she was near poverty and had to raise her young daughter.
She says she was clinically depressed at that point. “It’s so difficult to describe depression to someone who’s never been there, because it’s not sadness. I know sadness. Sadness is to cry and to feel. But it’s that cold absence of feeling — that really hollowed-out feeling.”, Rowling described. Sounds familiar? Yep, that’s how she came up with dementors.
She frequently replies to fans on twitter who share theirs stories of mental illness and even said once that writing Harry Potter is what saved her from depression.
- Gabourey Sidibe
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In 2017, the Oscar nominated actress opened up about her history with mental illness in her memoir, “This Is Just My Face: Try Not To Stare”. In the book, she talks about her life in New York and her struggles with anxiety, depression and bulimia. “I wrote about depression because it was a huge deal to me. I had actually been showing signs of depression since I was nine years old but everyone ignored it.”, she said. At the time she couldn’t even talk about it with her mother, who believed this wasn’t a real issue.
Gabourey also talks about how she developed an eating disorder while in college. She would go through long periods of time of starving herself and had suicidal thoughts. But the actress sought professional help after realising she couldn’t deal with these things by herself. She still sees a therapist and encouraged people to do the same in an interview.
“I just accepted depression as something that’s part of my anatomy; it’s part of my chemistry, it’s part of my biology. When it’s too big for me to just turn around on my own, I see a therapist.”, she said.
- Kristen Bell
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Cheerful, happy and positive, actress Kristen Bell (The Good Place, Veronica Mars, Frozen) is a great example of the fact that appearances don’t matter when it comes to mental health. She has been struggling with anxiety and depression her whole life, and she wasn’t always open about it. Kristen told TODAY Parents that her husband, actor Dax Shepard, encouraged her to be open about her mental health because he knew it could help people – he talks a lot about his sobriety and it has helped others as well.
In an interview for “Off Camera With Sam Jones”, Kristen said that, when she was around 18 years old, her mom told her that there was a serotonin imbalance in their family line, which can lead to depression. They talked about what depression felt like, based on her mom’s experiences, and how Kristen could help herself.
They always had a “really open and honest dialogue about mental health”, which allowed Kristen to not feel ashamed when it comes to talking about her depression, anxiety and taking prescription.
- Mayim Bialik
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Actress, author and neuroscientist, Mayim Bialik (Big Bang Theory, Blossom), has given numerous interviews and speeches in which she talks about how mental illness has affected her and her family.
In a video for Child Mind Institute’s mental health awareness campaign, she talked to her younger self about depression. “I had this notion when I was younger that if something didn’t work once, that nothing would ever work. And I wish I could have told my younger self that something will work.”
Last month, she went to Omaha, Nebraska, to speak at Community Alliance’s Breaking the Silence program, an event that battles to end the stigma and increase understanding by Breaking The Silence about mental illness. During the event, Mayim talked about the importance of having “people around you that understand and accept you, people you can talk to and trust.”
- Lily Allen
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Lily Allen also wrote a book about her life and the dark side of fame. In “My Thoughts Exactly”, she talks about how fame affected her mental health. She stopped eating while promoting her second album, she felt self conscious about her body because of the pressures photo shoots and red carpets put on her. “Part of me getting ready for a show would be to vomit for 20 minutes. Then I’d clean up my face and start doing my hair and makeup. I just felt really fat and grotesque”, she said in an interview with Cosmopolitan.
She also writes about her postnatal depression and about going on tour and not seeing her family for months on end and the toll that took on her mental health. The parties and the drugs got so intense during that period of her life that Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin staged an intervention.
- Ulrikke Falch
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Actress Ulrikke Falch, mostly known for portraying Vilde in the norwegian TV show, SKAM, is very open about many subjects that could be considered polemic by some. Feminism, female masturbation, and, of course, mental health. On an interview with Paper Magazine, she has said that being open about mental health issues and feminism on her platforms is really important, because, in Norway, there’s not a lot of discourse around these subjects.
During that interview, she said that, when younger, she struggled with eating disorders, and the thing that saved her was having an open conversation about it with her family. “My dad and my twin sister struggled along with me. I saw their pain, I saw what my illness did to them, and eventually that’s what saved me.” She also said that she “wanted to use that openness that we had in our family and bring it out on social media and inspire other people to talk more candidly about it.”