Mel B: “The past 6 months have been incredibly hard for me. Sometimes it is too hard to cope with all the emotions I feel. But the problem has never been about sex or alcohol – it is underneath all that I am fully aware I have been at crisis point. No one knows myself better than I do, but I am deling with it”.
Mel B revealed she had been diagnosed with PTSD in the aftermath of her divorce.
Willow Smith: “I was just plunged into this black hole and I was cutting myself”. Willow stopped self harming 5 years ago.
Mariah Carey: “I’m actually taking medication that seems to be pretty good.Finding the proper balance is what is most important”. She revelaled a 17 yr long battle with Bipolar disorder.
Liam Payne: “I let it get to me that day. I wasn’t in a good place. And unfortunately I was going through a rough time and I let it get to me a little bit too much”. Liam spoke about how being in One Diredtion impacted his mental health and didn’t give him time to take stock and deal with his issue as they had such a hectic schedule. Always on to the next thing. Liam admitted he had been struggling to cope.
Demi Lovato: “If anything, I’m proud to be bipolar and speak about it.I deal with mood swings, I deal with episodes of mania and bipolar-depression phases as well”.
Demi Lovato: “I think it’s important that people no longer look at mental illness as something taboo to talk about,” she said at the National Council for Behavioral Health in Washington DC. “It’s something that’s extremely common, one in five adults has a mental illness, so basically everyone is essentially connected to this problem and this epidemic. The problem with mental illness is people don’t look at it as a physical illness. When you think about it, the brain is actually the most complex organ in your body. We need to treat it like a physical illness and take it seriously.”
Taylor Swift: “I’m always terrified that something’s going to happen. And I’m not going to be able to do this anymore and it’s all going to end in one day”. Taylor Swift on anxiety.
J.K.Rowling: “It’s difficult to describe depression to someone who’s never been there, because it’s not sadness”.
Emma Stone: ” I was a very, very anxious child and I had a lot of panic attacks”.
Jennifer Lawrence: “I just try to acknowledge that the scrutiny is stressful. So I’ve got to try to let it go, and try to be myself, and focus on important things, like picking up dog poop”. JL on her anxiety.
Jennifer Lawrence: “I think that there’s such a huge stigma over it [mental illness], that I hope we can get rid of, or help… I mean, people have diabetes or asthma and they have to take medication for it. But as soon as you have to take medication for your mind, there’s this instant stigma. Hopefully we’ve given those people hope, and made people realize that it’s not–“
Beyonce: “Now that I was famous, I was afraid I would never find somebody again to love me for me. I was afraid of making new friends. That’s when I decided I only have two choices: I can give up, or I can go on”.
Sia: “I have social anxiety. When I’m off stage, I’m trying not to be a manic freak. I’m quite shy”.
Lady Gaga: “I learned that my sadness never destroyed what was great about me. You just have to go back to the greatness, find that one little thing that’s left. I’m lucky I found a glimmer stored away”.
Lady Gaga: “I’ve suffered through depression and anxiety my entire life,” she said. “I just want these kids to know that … this modern thing, where everyone is feeling shallow and less connected? That’s not human,”
Adele: “I have panic attacks, constant panicking. My heart feels like it is going to explode because I never feel like I’m going to deliver, ever”.
Adele: “I can slip in and out of [depression] quite easily, I had really bad postpartum depression after I had my son, and it frightened me,” she said. “I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I was very reluctant…Four of my friends felt the same way I did, and everyone was too embarrassed to talk about it.”
Miley Cyrus: “So many people look at my depression as me being ungrateful, but that is not it. I can’t help it…There’s nothing worse than being fake happy. I had moments where I didn’t want to carry on living”.
Cara Delevigne: “I was so ashamed of how I felt because I had such a privileged upbringing,” she said on This Morning. “I’m very lucky. But I had depression. I had moments where I didn’t want to carry on living. But then the guilt of feeling that way and not being able to tell anyone because I shouldn’t feel that way just left me feeling blame and guilt.
Katy Perry: “It’s not just been one time that I felt really low. I have my own addictions that I struggle with, whether that’s love or substance or things like that, and it’s up and down… even attention, I get so much attention and that can become addiction.”
Robbie Williams: ‘I’ve got a disease in my head that wants to kill me.’ Referring to his battle with depression.
Angelina Jolie: “If being sane is thinking there’s something wrong with being different, I’d rather be completely #%%^&^ mental.”
Brad Pitt: “I’m not a big proponent of happiness. I think it’s highly overrated. I think misery is underrated. There’s so much value in that. You can’t have one without the other”.
Ruby Wax: “The thing about depression is – and why people feel – well I feel a lot of shame is that there is nothing wrong with you on the outside. I mean you know you don’t have any lumps, or you don’t have any scars. You are not in a wheelchair. So people go “Come on, come on!” Especially in England they say “Stiff upper lip; snap out of it.” And you can’t.
I mean it is like being pregnant; you are either pregnant or you are not. So when you are sick it is the real thing. I mean you know it. It is not like you are sitting on your porch singing the blues with a banjo because your baby has left you. I mean this is deep, dark, numbing abyss hell. So you will know when you have got it; but the point is nobody will believe you and that is the kind of horror of it all.”
Barack Obama: “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek”.
Juliette Lewis: “The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die”.
Kendall Jenner: “I have such debilitating anxiety because of everything going on that I literally wake up in the middle of the night with full-on panic attacks,” she told Cara Delevingne in an interview. “Where do I even start? Everything is so horrible, it’s hard to name one thing. I just think that the world needs so much love. I wish I had the power to send Cupid around the planet, as cheesy as that sounds. You go online and you see everyone saying the worst things to each other, and it’s hard to stay positive. It’s hard not to get eaten alive by all the negativity”.
Carrie Fisher: “I have a chemical imbalance that, in its most extreme state, will lead me to a mental hospital,” Carrie Fisher revealed to Diane Sawyer. “I used to think I was a drug addict, pure and simple — just someone who could not stop taking drugs willfully. And I was that. But it turns out that I am severely manic depressive. You can’t stop. It’s very painful. It’s raw. You know, it’s rough… your bones burn… when you’re not busy talking and trying to drown it out.
Ellen Degeneres: “When I walked out of the studio after five years of working so hard, knowing I had been treated so disrespectfully for no other reason than I was gay, I just went into this deep, deep depression. It’s so corny but it’s true. You have no idea where the darkest times of your life might end, so you have to just keep going,” she explained.
Lili Reinhart:”I had so much anxiety booking work, and I spent almost five months holed up in this bedroom in this house just feeling anxious, waiting for my next audition, and not doing anything else. It was the most miserable time of my life,” she told W Magazine. “I had had to quit a few jobs in North Carolina because of how anxious they made me. My anxiety was so bad that I had to keep quitting jobs because I physically could not work…I threw up in my Uber because, one, I was carsick, and two, I was having a panic attack. I get home, lock the door in my room, immediately Skype my mom and said, ‘Mom, I’m not okay.’ I felt like my world was crashing. I didn’t want to admit defeat, but I was like, ‘I need to come home. My mental health is suffering and it’s making me physically ill”.
Nikki Minaj: It was just one dead end after another,” Nicki said of contemplating suicide. “At one point, I was, like, ‘What would happen if I just didn’t wake up?’ That’s how I felt. Like, ‘Maybe I should just take my life?’”
Amanda Seyfried: “I’m on Lexapro, and I’ll never get off of it,” she told Allure. “I’ve been on it since I was 19, so 11 years. I’m on the lowest dose. I don’t see the point of getting off of it. Whether it’s placebo or not, I don’t want to risk it. And what are you fighting against? Just the stigma of using a tool? A mental illness is a thing that people cast in a different category [from other illnesses], but I don’t think it is. It should be taken as seriously as anything else. You don’t see the mental illness: It’s not a mass; it’s not a cyst. But it’s there. Why do you need to prove it? If you can treat it, you can treat it”.
Winona Ryder: “You can’t pay enough money to cure that feeling of being broken and confused. It’s not like every day’s been great ever since,” she explained. “You have good days and bad days, and depression’s something that, y’know, is always with you”.
Olivia Munn: “OCD comes from a place of needing to feel safe… I had it growing up, having had a little bit of a tumultuous upbringing, moving around a lot with a mixed family with five kids”.
Ellie Goulding: “I started having panic attacks, and the scariest part was it could be triggered by anything. I used to cover my face with a pillow whenever I had to walk outside from the car to the studio,” she wrote in an essay for Well+Good. “My new life as a pop star certainly wasn’t as glamorous as all my friends from home thought. Secretly, I was really struggling physically and emotionally.”
Selena Gomez: “I’ve discovered that anxiety, panic attacks and depression can be side effects of lupus, which can present their own challenges,” she told People. “I want to be proactive and focus on maintaining my health and happiness and have decided that the best way forward is to take some time off […] I know I am not alone by sharing this, I hope others will be encouraged to address their own issues.”
Sarah Silverman: “People use ‘panic attack’ very casually out here in Los Angeles,” she told Glamour. “But I don’t think most of them really know what it is. Every breath is labored. You are dying. You are going to die. It’s terrifying. And then when the attack is over, the depression is still there…I wouldn’t wish depression on anyone. But if you ever experience it, or are experiencing it right now, just know that on the other side, the little joys in life will be that much sweeter. The tough times, the days when you’re just a ball on the floor-they’ll pass. You’re playing the long game and life is totally worth it”.
Zayn Malik: “I found it really frustrating that, even now that I was being upfront about what the issue was, some people still found reasons to doubt it. But that’s the industry. It’s an aspect of this job that I have to deal with, and I’m trying to accept it,” Zayn wrote in an excerpt of his book that was published by Time. “The thing is, I love performing. I love the buzz. I don’t want to do any other job. That’s why my anxiety is so upsetting and difficult to explain. It’s this thing that swells up and blocks out your rational thought processes. Even when you know you want to do something, know that it will be good for you, that you’ll enjoy it when you’re doing it, the anxiety is telling you a different story. It’s a constant battle within yourself.”
Kristin Bell: “There’s nothing weak about struggling with mental illness,” she wrote in an essay for Motto. “For me, depression is not sadness. It’s not having a bad day and needing a hug. It gave me a complete and utter sense of isolation and loneliness. Its debilitation was all-consuming, and it shut down my mental circuit board. I felt worthless, like I had nothing to offer, like I was a failure. Now, after seeking help, I can see that those thoughts, of course, couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s important for me to be candid about this so people in a similar situation can realize that they are not worthless and that they do have something to offer. We all do”.
Kerry Washington: “I say that publicly because I think it’s really important to take the stigma away from mental health,” she told Glamour. “My brain and my heart are really important to me. I don’t know why I wouldn’t seek help to have those things be as healthy as my teeth. I go to the dentist. So why wouldn’t I go to a shrink?”
Gwyneth Paltrow: “I felt like a zombie. I couldn’t access my heart. I couldn’t access my emotions. I couldn’t connect,” she told Good Housekeeping. “I thought postpartum depression meant you were sobbing every single day and incapable of looking after a child,” she explains. “But there are different shades of it and depths of it, which is why I think it’s so important for women to talk about it. It was a trying time. I felt like a failure.”
Halle Berry: “I was sitting in my car, and I knew the gas was coming when I had an image of my mother finding me,” told Parade magazine about contemplating suicide after her divorce. “She sacrificed so much for her children, and to end my life would be an incredibly selfish thing to do. It was all about a relationship. My sense of worth was so low”.
Prince Harry: “I’ve spent most of my life saying ‘I’m fine,'” Prince Harry said in an interview with The Telegraph journalist Bryony Gordon on her mental health podcast. “I can safely say that losing my mum at the age of 12 and therefore shutting down all of my emotions for the last 20 years has had a quite serious effect on not only my personal life but also my work as well…I have probably been very close to a complete breakdown on numerous occasions.”
Zendaya: “I used to struggle with anxiety pretty bad,” she wrote in a post on her app. “It only happened when I sang live, not when I danced or did any other live performances, and it stemmed from a bad experience I had while singing on ‘The Ellen DeGeneres Show’ in 2013. It wasn’t my best performance and I’ve never let myself live that down. I had mad anxiety ever since that.”
Kristin Stewart: “Between ages 15 and 20, it was really intense. I was constantly anxious. I was kind of a control freak. If I didn’t know how something was going to turn out, I would make myself ill, or just be locked up or inhibited in a way that was really debilitating,” she said. “I’ve come out the other end not hardened but strong. I have an ability to persevere that I didn’t have before. It’s like when you fall on your face so hard and the next time, you’re like, Yeah, so? I’ve fallen on my face before”.
Will Young: “It’s very isolating. There’s a part of my brain that is telling me that you’re about to die, you either shut down, freeze or you run. The only thing I can do is go to bed.” He added: “There have been dreadful times where I’ve been suicidal and on the floor.”
Justin Bieber: “I’m struggling just to get through the days. I think a lot of people are. This life can rip you apart. [I get depressed] all the time. And I feel isolated. You’re in your hotel room and there are fans all around, paparazzi following you everywhere, and it gets intense. When you can’t go anywhere or do anything alone you get depressed. I would not wish this upon anyone.”
Colin Farrell: “Desperation will allow you to do incredible things in the name of survival…I had created an environment for myself, a way of living for myself which, on the outside, seemed incredibly gregarious and vivacious. “I don’ believe I have any chemical predisposition towards depression, but let’s just call it… I was suffering from a spiritual malady for years and I induldged it.”
Nicole Scherzinger: “I had started losing my voice, I couldn’t sing at shows, and then I remember my manager finding me passed out on the floor in Malta or in the south of France. I thought, ‘I’m going to lose everything I love if I don’t love myself.’ … It’s sad to see how I wasted my life. I had such a great life on the outside, the [Pussycat] Dolls were on top of the world, but I was miserable on the inside. I’m never letting that happen again; you only get one life – I was 27 only once.”
Catherine Zeta-Jones: “I never wanted to be as open about it as I was. I have a British stiff-upper-lip mentality. I’m not the kind of person who likes to shout out my personal issues from the rooftops but, with my bipolar becoming public, I hope fellow sufferers will know it is completely controllable. I hope I can help remove any stigma attached to it, and that those who don’t have it under control will seek help with all that is available to treat it. If I’ve helped anybody by discussing bipolar or depression, that’s great.”
Frankie Bridge: “One night, I got upset because Wayne (Bridge, her husband) hadn’t bought the right yoghurts; I managed to convince myself that he didn’t know me at all. It set off this spiral of negative thinking – that if I disappeared, it wouldn’t matter to anyone. In fact, it would make everybody’s life easier. I felt that I was worthless, that I was ugly, that I didn’t deserve anything.”
It lead To Frankie going to hospital to get treatment and helped her get it under control.
She added: “Nine times out of ten, my depression is under control. I get a bit emotional to think I felt so low about myself, that I shouldn’t be around people I love, because I can’t make them happy. I did lose myself, but I feel like me again now.”
Hayden Panettiere: “It’s something a lot of women experience. When [you hear] about postpartum depression you think it’s ‘I feel negative feelings towards my child, I want to hurt my child. I’ve never, ever had those feelings. Some women do. But you don’t realise how broad of a spectrum you can really experience that on. It’s something that needs to be talked about. Women need to know that they’re not alone, and that it does heal.”
She continued: “It’s something that’s completely uncontrollable. It’s really painful and it’s really scary and women need a lot of support. There’s a lot of misunderstanding. There’s a lot of people out there that think it’s not real, that it’s not true, that it’s something that’s made up in their minds, that ‘Oh, it’s hormones.’ They brush it off.”
Kate Moss: “I had a nervous breakdown when I was 17 or 18, when I had to go and work with Marky Mark and Herb Ritts. It didn’t feel like me at all. I felt really bad about straddling this buff guy. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks. I thought I was going to die.”
David Beckham: “I’ve got this Obsessive Compulsive Disorder where I have to have everything in a straight line or everything has to be in pairs. I’ll put my Pepsi cans in the fridge and if there’s one too many then I’ll put it in another cupboard somewhere.
The father of four added: “I’ll go into a hotel room. Before I can relax I have to move all the leaflets and all the books and put them in a drawer. Everything has to be perfect.”
Emma Thompson: “I think my first bout [of depression]of that was when I was doing Me and My Girl, funnily enough. I really didn’t change my clothes or answer the phone, but went into the theatre every night and was cheerful and sang the Lambeth Walk. That’s what actors do. But I think that was my first bout with an actual clinical depression. The 55-year-old admitted it was work that helped her get better and also meeting her husband, Greg Wise on set of Sense and Sensibility. She said: “The only thing I could do was write. I used to crawl from the bedroom to the computer and just sit and write, and then I was alright, because I was not present. “Sense and Sensibility really saved me from going under, I think, in a very nasty way.”
Kate Winslet: “When I was 15, I was nearly 14 stone. I was uncomfortable and self-conscious. I knew I wanted to be an actress and was big. Over a year I sensibly got down to 10 stone. Then I became addicted to losing weight and went too far. I was never anorexic or bulimic.
“I went through a three-month experimental laxative time, which was absolutely awful. Luckily I was strong enough to be able to say to myself, ‘What are you doing? You are just really hungry.’ The whole weight thing drives me crazy. This stuff is so important to me because I have been there and know what a vicious cycle it is.”
Drew Barrymore: “I really had a fear that I was going to die at 25. And half yes, because no matter how dark shit got, I always had a sense that there should be goodness. I never went all the way into darkness. There were so many things I could have done that would have pushed me over the edge and I just knew not to go there.”
Kesha: “I’ve always tried to be a crusader for loving yourself, but I’d been finding it harder and harder to do personally. I felt like part of my job was to be as skinny as possible, and to make that happen, I had been abusing my body. I just wasn’t giving it the energy it needed to keep me healthy and strong. My brain told me to just suck it up and press on, but in my heart I knew that something had to change. So I made the decision to practice what I preach. I put my career on hold and sought treatment. I had to learn to treat my body with respect.”
Adam Levine: “When I was first diagnosed with ADHD, it wasn’t a surprise because I had difficulty in high school focusing. And I think now, people notice my ADHD as an adult on a daily basis. When I can’t pay attention, I really can’t pay attention.”
Khalid: “Mental health is so important man,” the 19-year-old musician tweeted. “I’m not feeling the best rn and my anxiety is super bad, love u guys.”
Fergie: At my lowest point, I was [suffering from] chemically induced psychosis and dementia. I was hallucinating on a daily basis. It took a year after getting off that drug for the chemicals in my brain to settle so that I stopped seeing things. I’d just be sitting there, seeing a random bee or bunny”.
Pope Francis: In a September interview promoting his upcoming book, “Pope Francis: Politics and Society,” Pope Francis spoke about going to therapy. He said in the 1970s, he visited a psychoanalyst once a week for six months to help him “clarify things.” He also said seeing a therapist helped him a lot and made him “feel free.” His words were important in normalizing conversations surrounding mental health in the Christian community.
Trevor Noah: “Jim Carrey was one of the first comedians that described the beast that many of us face in this room and that’s depression,” Noah said in his acceptance speech. “I didn’t know what that thing was. I just thought I liked sleeping for weeks on end sometimes.
Jim Carrey on his experience with depression: “It feels like a low level of despair that you’re in. You’re not getting any answers but you’re living okay and smiling at the office…but it’s a low level of despair.”
Nicole Kidman: Big screen starlet Nicole Kidman has had to deal with overwhelming panic attacks when she gets on the red carpet. She said, “I panic in front of all the cameras. My hands start shaking and I have trouble breathing. Tom [her then husband] would always whisper to me that everything was all right.”
Naomi Watts: “I actually remember driving along Mulholland Drive thinking, ‘I’ll just takea right turn here. Maybe I’ll just go over the cliff, because I can’t take it any more.’ But I never had the guts to actually quit. My friend Nicole (Kidman) would tell me, ‘All it takes is one film.’ And that film turned out to be Mulholland Drive It was a life saver because I was about to be evicted from my L.A. apartment.”
Dwayne Johnson: “I found that, with depression, one of the most important things you could realize is that you’re not alone,” Johnson said during an episode of Oprah’s Master Class on the OWN network. “You’re not the first to go through it; you’re not going to be the last to go through it … I wish I had someone at that time who could just pull me aside and [say], ‘Hey, it’s gonna be okay. It’ll be okay.’ So I wish I knew that.”
Robin Williams: “Depression is never taken seriously enough….You don’t know what it is until you have it…..there is no color,taste, or joy…..there is no reason…”.
Anna Wintour: “I think mental health is an area where people are embarrassed… They don’t want to talk about it because somehow they feel they’re a failure as a parent or, you know, they’re embarrassed for their child or they want to protect their child, lots of very good reasons, but mental health I feel is something that you have to talk about. That time from 15 to 16 to your mid- to late 20s – you look grown-up, people think you’re grown-up, but you’re still a kid.”
Many celebrities attend rehab when they feel they cannot cope. There is a rehab in Florida helping celebrities, as well as many in Los Angeles and across The United States and in the rest of the world. Mental illness is not something to be ashamed of. One in four of us will experience mental health issues in our lifetime. It happens to the best of us.
Mandy X
Author: Mandy Kloppers
Mandy is a qualified therapist who treats depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, trauma, and many other types of mental health issues. She provides online therapy around the world for those needing support and also provides relationship counselling.
