This article discusses a broad spectrum of mental health issues, including body image, eating disorders, depression, suicide, bipolar disorder, stress, and anxiety, which may be triggering for some readers.
Sometimes it's easy to forget that celebrities are just like normal people. They might be rich, famous, and have massive social platforms, but they go through heartbreak, mental health issues, and second-guess themselves just as much as anyone else. Often, they're even their own worst critics after seeing all of society's comments on their lives. Lately, many celebrities, including Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, Olivia Rodrigo and Shawn Mendes, have been using their large platforms to openly discuss their personal battles with mental health.
Through raw and vulnerable, even heartbreaking documentaries, celebrities are tackling the subject of mental health by sharing their own struggles with eating disorders, anxiety, depression, stress and much more. By candidly and honestly discussing their own stories rather than hiding them from the public eye, these celebrities are reminding their fans going through similar experiences that they're not alone. More importantly, they're reducing the societal stigma still surrounding mental health discussions. A list of the best mental health discussions in celebrity documentaries follows.
Taylor Swift Feels Like She Never Meets Impossible Beauty Standards
In Miss Americana (2020), Taylor Swift describes the pressure she has felt to meet impossible societal beauty standards. She says that she has learned to stay away from looking at pictures of herself every day because sometimes people might comment that she looks pregnant, or she will see a photo where her tummy looks too big. In the past, instances like these have triggered her to go through periods of starvation when she exercises more but stops eating.
Swift would also go through concerts feeling like she was about to pass out at any moment, and she felt like that was normal until she realized it wasn't supposed to feel that way. Now, she's in a much healthier mindset where she doesn't mind so much if someone points out she's gained a bit of weight because she knows that it's better to think you look fat than to look sick. Whenever she comes across something that could potentially trigger her eating disorder, she knows how to talk herself out of going back into that unhealthy and self-destructive spiral.
Selena Gomez Shares Her Battle With Anxiety, Depression, and Bipolar Disorder
Selena Gomez and Swift have shared similar body image issues due to beauty standards. Less than five minutes into My Mind and Me (2022), Gomez is trying on costumes for her Revival tour back in 2016 when she says she doesn't want to have to stick out her chest or butt to remind people that she's a woman and not a 12-year-old boy. She struggled with a lot of pressure to shed her Disney image, anxiety over having the tour be perfect and spiraled into a depression to the point where she didn't want to be alive anymore, and the tour was canceled due to her having a mental breakdown.
Gomez was in the darkest place of her life, and she was lashing out at the people who cared about her most when she got diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Although she was able to become herself again and is in a better place now, she constantly worries that if her bipolar disorder is triggered again, she might not be able to come back from it. The rest of the documentary is just as heartbreaking as she describes her battle with Lupus and how the pain of her chronic illness is a constant obstacle that she struggles to overcome. Even though she has been through hell and back and is haunted by her past sometimes, she now remains optimistic about her mental health journey, stating that she's simply "a work in progress."
Olivia Rodrigo Struggles With the Pressure of Her Instant Superstar Status
Olivia Rodrigo instantly sky-rocketed to superstar status in early 2021 with her debut single, "drivers license." She would later go on to win three Grammys for her debut album, SOUR. Becoming a global superstar overnight was a lot of pressure for the teen, who was barely 18 at the time and still reeling from the drama that came from her single release and her first big heartbreak. In Driving Home 2 U (2022), she discusses the success of "drivers license" and how it changed her life, but she felt immense pressure and stress to match the success of her hit debut single, and it was scary to think about the reception of any kind of follow-up music.
After the success of the song, Rodrigo almost pulled the plug on the release of her second single, "deja vu," because she hated it and thought nobody would like it. When she wrote "drivers license," she had no idea it would blow up the way it did because even though it was special to her, she didn't expect the devastation of the worst heartbreak she had gone through to resonate with other people on such a deep level. She even describes herself as "her own worst critic," explaining that being a child actor, who was praised for every little thing she did, made her believe everything she did was the opposite of great. Her major success is largely attributed to the fact that this makes her strive to be better in everything that she pursues.
Shawn Mendes Is Learning To Live With His Daily Anxiety
Another celebrity that dealt with a lot of anxiety and pressure over having to cancel part of their tour is Shawn Mendes. In his documentary In Wonder (2020), he discusses having to cancel a show in São Paulo due to having a severe case of laryngitis. In order to preserve his voice for the rest of the tour, which still had 11 shows left, he had to make the tough decision to cancel at the last minute. He says the pressure of having to cancel a concert was largely because he felt like he was letting down his fans. The guilt over letting his fans down was overwhelming because they were the reason for his success.
Mendes compares his career for the next ten years to an athlete in their prime. He has to keep going full-speed ahead, and everything he does is going to be criticized and watched for those ten years. This doesn't leave much time for him to prioritize himself, which is something that he's trying to work on. Now, he tries to write about his anxiety like it's a companion he has to live with rather than an enemy he has to resist. In July 2022, he even had to cancel the rest of his Wonder tour, citing the need to take time that he's never taken to personally prioritize his mental health, which definitely seems like a hard but necessary step in the right direction to his journey of self-healing.