For far too long, topics relating to depression, mood disorders, and anxiety have been labeled taboo. It’s time to tear off the veil of secrecy surrounding mental health issues.
Sadly, those who were brave enough to come forward with their mental health struggles were frequently stigmatized by society at large. As a result of this intense, unwarranted judgment, many individuals felt there was no choice but to keep their disorders a secret.
With the passage of time, we’ve seen a turn of the tides in the US surrounding topics relating to mental illness. Now that research sheds light on how common these issues are, many people are encouraged to speak out about them. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, 1 in 5 individuals in the US struggle with issues relating to mental health.
Celebrities open up about mental health issues
For decades, mega-stars did their best to present only the most polished and sparkling versions of themselves and even give off an aura of mystery.
But nowadays, many celebrities are opening up to fans about their mental health struggles. Consumers of pop culture seem hungry for shared stories and experiences that are transparent and relatable rather than glamorized perfection. This cultural shift permits movie stars and pop sensations to get real with the world about personal issues that are far from picture-perfect.
Eliminating the stigma associated with depression, anxiety, PTSD, and more
When megastars get vulnerable and share about their behavioral health issues, individuals who are battling with mental illness feel seen. Knowing that their favorite actors and musicians also deal with anxiety, OCD, and depression can help so many people feel less alone.
And, fans can feel less ashamed about their own personal struggles when the people they look up to face similar obstacles.
If Selena Gomez can release an entire documentary about her experiences with bipolar disorder, it takes a weight off of people’s shoulders. If Megan The Stallion can shamelessly drop a track called “Anxiety,” fans can feel a sense of validation for their emotions. There’s something so comforting about knowing these mega-stars really are “just like us.”
But are these celebrities oversharing about their mental health?
Are Celebrities too candid with fans?
Not everyone is on board with this newfound transparency. On the other hand, a growing number of pop culture consumers think these celebs’ first-world issues have no relation to real-world problems and leave them totally out of touch.
Considering how wealthy most A-list stars are…some are convinced that celebrities will never understand the tribulations that lower and middle-class people face. As a result, some argue that celebrities have resources and access to things most of us could never dream of so they should have less mental stress.
Back in 2022, Bella Hadid was famously dragged when a resurfaced clip featured her crying when she couldn’t have a designer bag.
Of course, we’re all aware that Kendall Jenner has faced years of criticism for using her platform to talk about her crippling anxiety,
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“There is going to be those people that say, ‘Oh, OK, what does she have to worry about? What does she have to be anxious about?” the Keeping Up With The Kardashians star said in an interview with Vogue.
While Jenner goes on to acknowledge her privilege, she also says that fame doesn’t automatically preclude her troubles with mental illness. The reality star adds, “I’m still a human being at the end of the day.”
And let’s not forget during the height of the pandemic, when A-listers were brutally attacked online for complaining about being stuck inside their homes despite living in million-dollar mansions. In this instance, the masses were not so quick to sympathize with celebrities’ complaints.
When Ellen Degeneres whined about being unable to go outside during the pandemic and compared it to “being in jail,” the general public called her out.
Sophie Turner and other celebrities use their platform to advocate for mental health
But the notion that celebrities are out of touch when it comes to their first-world struggles is only half the argument.
Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan stirred the pot when he suggested many celebrities “fake” mental health issues in an effort to boost their careers. “Sadly, I know a lot of well-known people (not The Rock) who’ve jumped on the ‘victimhood’ bandwagon to get positive publicity for themselves,” the controversial figure tweeted in 2019. “They do those with genuine mental illness a great disservice.”
His controversial take was met with a wave of backlash from celebs and the general public alike. Game of Thrones superstar Sophie Turner, who is an avid advocate of mental health, clapped back at the Good Morning Britain host.
She responded in a heated tweet, saying, "Or maybe they have a platform to speak out about it and help get rid of the stigma of mental illness, which affects 1 in 4 people in the UK per year. But please go ahead and shun them back into silence.”
Sophie Turner via Twitter
There seems to be a divide over how people feel about celebrities sharing intimate details regarding their mental health affairs. Whether you believe stars are splattering personal concerns all over social media simply to remain relevant or if you genuinely think they do a terrific job destigmatizing mental health problems is entirely up to you.
Personally, I love it when people like Demi Lovato and Ariana Grande reveal their struggles with depression and anxiety because it makes me feel less sensitive and ashamed about my own inner frailties. And I feel less alone.
The way I see it, when someone like Kendall Jenner gets brutally honest about her journey with crippling anxiety, it creates a sense of unity for everyone out there who is dealing with the same thing. Kendall, along with a slew of other celebrities, leverages her platform to build a fervent discourse on topics that have been swept under the rug for far too long.
Learning to Live in Apocalyptic Times: How Climate Despair Can Save (or Destroy) the World
Climate despair is becoming so widespread that some people are losing their will to live. Is this the new normal?
If you're reading this, you probably know that the earth is not doing well. A 2018 UN report declared that we have 12 years to keep the global climate from rising more than 1.5 degrees, or we'll face catastrophic warming levels. Even knowing this, our worldwide carbon emissions have only continued to rise, with atmospheric CO2 reaching a record high at 417.4 ppm in May 2019.
In essence, we know the world is ending, we know why, and yet we have done nothing to stop it. In fact, things are getting worse.
Image via blog.derby.ac.uk
The Argument for Despair
Faced with this truth, it's all too easy to slip into despair, and this is what's happening to people all over the world. A recent VICE article explored the mental health crises that many people are experiencing because of climate change. Known as "climate despair," sometimes called "eco-nihilism" or "human futilitarianism," chronic feelings of hopelessness about climate change are becoming all too common among those who have allowed themselves to fully comprehend the extent of the crisis.
For people who suffer from these feelings, it doesn't help that life appears to be continuing on as normal, while only a few of us seem to care that the world is burning down. This creates a sense of duality that can be even more painful than consciously accepting the reality of climate change, as it involves a deep suppression of pain and fear, which is then left to fester in the psyche. Living this "double life," according to Joanna Macy's essay "Working Through Environmental Despair," can be detrimental. "Awesome and unprecedented in the history of humanity, the awareness lurks there, with an anguish beyond naming," she writes.
This awareness can manifest in many ways; and often it has lead to depression or suicidal thoughts. Even therapists are having trouble knowing how to handle the looming specter of climate despair. Several people quoted in the VICE article described how their therapists attempted to trace their terror of climate change back to personal traumas, instead of acknowledging the validity of these fears.
Image via Its Nice That
Children are just as vulnerable to these feelings as adults. As they watch governments refuse to act, kids are growing up in the world with little faith in the government or the adults around them, and with the knowledge that they've been born into a disaster they never asked for but have to deal with.
Greta Thunberg was one of these kids. She's spoken extensively about the feelings of despair that nearly paralyzed her as she became more and more aware of the climate crisis. "Before I started school striking, I was … so depressed and I didn't want to do anything," she once said.
But when she began to speak, as many of us know, she became one of the most outspoken and well-known climate activists in the world. According to Thunberg, this was not a choice. "I feel like dying inside if I don't protest," she said. For those suffering from climate despair, that feeling of dying inside is a familiar one. But Greta's inspiring actions contain seeds of hope, perhaps the best hope against climate despair.
The truth is that things are only hopeless if we don't take action. Conveniently, taking action might also be one of the best things we can possibly do to work through climate despair.
Image via Handelszeitung
Our Best Shot at Hope
Although they might be realistic responses to the threat of climate change, feelings of despair—when they aren't turned into action, or are suffered through in solitude— present a terminal danger to the climate movement, as they promote stagnation when what is truly needed is unity and protest.
This doesn't mean that we should deny the gravity of the situation. Action begins with admitting the problem, not stuffing it away under layers of performative normalcy. "Until we find ways of acknowledging and integrating that level of anguished awareness," continues Joanna Macy, "we repress it; and with that repression we are drained of the energy we need for action and clear thinking."
Still, the answer is also not necessarily to let oneself fall down a hole of hopelessness. Often, the doomsday-esque reports that are inundating the Internet and certain academic circles can be the opposite of productive. Sometimes, these reports are inaccurate, overly dramatized and apocalyptic. These alarmist articles that proclaim that we are all doomed often have the opposite effect, shaking people into complicity when the truth is that though things are really bad, there is definitely hope.
There is hope.
Though we won't be able to reverse climate change, it is possible to salvage so much of the world and to prevent the worst consequences of ecological decline. Human beings have mobilized massively before—we've split atoms and spread cell phones across the globe in less than a decade—and we can do it again. We have the technology, the money, and the capability: All we need to avert immediate crisis is the will and the public support to elect people into office who will take action.
Image via Flickr
We have the resources to fight climate change. Many countries are instituting programs to reduce their carbon emissions. Small nations like Denmark and Belgium have successfully slashed their carbon emissions, and plans like the Paris Agreement are promising attempts at global change. What we need to do is fight, to spread awareness, to elect people into office who will take action, and to make it clear that we as a human race won't go down at the hands of an elite cult of carbon-worshipers determined to ruin all of our futures for the sake of their own fortunes.
Climate activism doesn't solely have to be a fight against something, though: it can be a fight for a better world. Though climate change is often painted as an entirely doom-and-gloom issue, some of the things that fighting it will combat it could actually benefit our whole society, healing some of the deep wounds that have caused our modern epidemic of mental illness, addiction, and loneliness.
According to Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, this impasse at the brink between oblivion and climate disaster presents an unprecedented opportunity for positive change. This crisis can be a beginning, not an ending, she argues: the beginning of a movement towards a more interconnected and compassionate world.
"Climate change—if treated as a true planetary emergency akin to those rising flood waters—could become a galvanizing force for humanity, leaving us all not just safer from extreme weather, but with societies that are safer and fairer in all kinds of other ways as well," she writes. "The resources required to rapidly move away from fossil fuels and prepare for the coming heavy weather could pull huge swaths of humanity out of poverty, providing services now sorely lacking, from clean water to electricity. This is a vision of the future that goes beyond just surviving or enduring climate change...It is a vision in which we collectively use the crisis to leap somewhere that seems, frankly, better than where we are right now."
This kind of future would require a paradigm shift, a complete departure from our current free-market model that glorifies isolated successes and prizes maximum consumption above all else. It would require that, among other things, we sacrifice our own desires for the good of everyone else.
We need to sacrifice the concept that the goal of life is to be able to pursue one's individual fortune to the highest level: And we have to acknowledge that we operate in an interconnected network, and must lift each other and our planet up, if we wish to continue to live on this earth.
The shift is already beginning. Organizations like Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion have emerged at the forefront of the fight against climate change; and artists are starting to wake up, too. But even if you don't have a massive platform or aren't going to protests, even just talking about the ecological crisis with others can ignite powerful chain reactions. Overall, probably the most meaningful thing you can do is work to elect officials who will make good on their promises to cut emissions and create a better world while doing it.
Image via Ethics and International Affairs
Where We Go From Here
Still, considering the amount of mobilization and effort that these changes require—and considering how determined major, extremely wealthy fossil fuel companies are to squander these efforts—it's extremely difficult to be hopeful all the time when it comes to the climate crisis. Plus we've already damaged some things beyond repair, and we've lost many people to the wildfires and hurricanes rooted in climate change; to name a few, the 79 people lost in California's Camp Fire, and the nearly 3,000 people who lost their lives in Hurricane Maria.
And so, as the VICE article proposes, to comprehend the full extent of the climate crisis, first we need to let ourselves grieve. We need to allow ourselves to grieve as we would in the face of any other tragedy—to comprehend the harm that we've done to our planet and to recognize and honor our feelings about it.
Once we recognize these feelings, we can begin to deal with them. As Macy continues, "To experience pain as we register what is happening to our world is a measure of our evolution as open systems. This is true not only from the perspective of systems science but from that of religion as well. How many mystics in their spiritual journey have spoken of the 'dark night of the soul'? Brave enough to let go of accustomed assurances, they let their old convictions and conformities dissolve into nothingness, and stood naked to the terror of the unknown. They let processes, which their minds could not encompass, work through them. It is in that darkness that birth takes place."
While it's important to embrace one's despair and grief regarding climate, it's equally important to view these feelings as starting points for a spiritual and political revolution, instead of hindrances that need to be suppressed. If we view climate as a consequence of evils we've always been peripherally cognizant of—like selfishness, greed, and the hypocrisy that plagues human society—then we can view the climate crisis as an opportunity to at the very least connect with other people who understand that we, collectively, cannot continue this way.
Through this lens, climate despair is far from an end point. Rather, it connects us to the world around us, and to other people who care enough to want to see a better future for everyone and everything. "As our pain for the world is rooted in our interconnectedness with all life, so surely is our power," writes Macy.
So if you're pained by climate change, good. That pain means you love something. That love means you're alive.
Image via Occidental Arts and Ecology Center