Today is World Mental Health Day, and Kate Middleton, Prince William and Prince Harry have been busy making appearances in London to help bring awareness to the cause. Their Heads Together campaign is aimed at ending stigmas around mental health, a cause on behalf of which the Duchess has been consistently outspoken, especially when it comes to the mental health of children. “Research published today by the Huffington Post indicates that around a third of parents still worry that they will look like a bad mother or father if their child has a mental health problem,” she’s said. “Parenting is hard enough without letting prejudices stop us from asking for the help we need for ourselves and our children.” We commend her for fighting to normalize this oft uncomfortable cause. Here, six celebrities dedicated to doing the same.
Kate Middleton advocating for the cause on World Mental Health Day 2016.
Cara Delevingne
Model, actress and all-around-amazing woman Cara Delevingne opened up about her struggles with depression at the 2015 Women in the World Summit. "I think I pushed myself so far [at school] that I got to the point where I had a mental breakdown… I was completely suicidal, I didn’t want to live any more. I thought that I was completely alone. I also realized how lucky I was, and what a wonderful family and wonderful friends I had, but that didn’t matter. I wanted the world to swallow me up, and nothing seemed better to me than death.”
Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga has been outspoken about her lifelong battle with anxiety and depression, offering this inspiring quote to Billboard last year: "I’ve suffered through depression and anxiety my entire life, I still suffer with it every single day. I just want these kids to know that that depth that they feel as human beings is normal. We were born that way. This modern thing, where everyone is feeling shallow and less connected? That's not human.”
Hayden Panettiere
Hayden Panettiere has been refreshingly transparent about her struggles with postpartum depression, with which her Nashville character Juliette Barnes also struggled. "It’s something that’s completely uncontrollable," she told Us Weekly last year. "It’s really painful and it’s really scary and women need a lot of support." This past spring, when her baby was 17 months-old, Hayden readmitted herself into treatment, saying on Instagram that "the postpartum depression I have been experiencing has impacted every area of my life."
Olivia Munn
Actress Olivia Munn suffers from an under-the-radar, anxiety-related condition called trichotillomania, which affects one to three percent of the population. In 2013, she told Marie Claire that the disorder manifests itself in "the urge to pull out my eyelashes."
Miley Cyrus
"I went through a time where I was really depressed. Like, I locked myself in my room and my dad had to break my door down," Miley told Elle in 2014. "There's not much that I'm closed off about, and the universe gave me all that so I could help people feel like they don't have to be something they're not, or feel like they have to be fake happy. There's nothing worse than being fake happy."
Gwyneth Paltrow
Following the birth of her son, Gwyneth has said she experienced a bout of postpartum depression. "I expected to have another period of euphoria following his birth, much the way I had when my daughter was born two years earlier," she wrote on Goop. "Instead I was confronted with one of the darkest and most painfully debilitating chapters of my life."
