Kristen Bell
If you watch TV and movies, you’ve probably heard of Kristen Bell. She’s been Eleanor in the Good Place, Anna from Frozen, and the titular character in Veronica Mars. It’s safe to say she has been in the industry for a while now, and being in a high-stress industry like entertainment is bound to take a toll on one’s mental health. This is true for Kristen Bell who has described facing issues with her mental health throughout various points in her life.
Bell has mentioned that her first experience with anxiety and depression came at 18 when she left home to study acting in New York.The experience was difficult for her because her feelings were difficult to place. She describes not feeling particularly awful or suicidal but instead trapped inside her own mind. She was inexplicably exhausted and would carry around these negative emotions like a dark cloud. This prompted Bell to seek help and soon she started taking medicine to treat her anxiety and depression. While some assume that Bell is a bubby, carefree individual without mental health struggles, she is quick to correct them on this assumption, because she needs to work to maintain her mental health. She explained in her Self Interview that “I know that I present [as?] someone who is very bubbly and happy all the time, and a lot of the time I am because I have really good tools.” Along with taking medication, Bell makes sure to exercise because the endorphins help her when she is having a bad day.
Even with all the tools she has, Bell still has bad days and she accepts this as a part of life. Quarantine was a particularly hard time for her and she has discussed that it took her a lot of time to get out of the rut the pandemic put her into. It also pushed her to be more vocal about her mental health struggles because she didn’t want to make people feel like they were struggling alone. She hopes that by sharing the tools in her toolbox, she can help other people who might be struggling like her. One of these tool is the way she handles her emotions. Bell makes sure to distance herself from her emotions: the bad feelings do not define who she is but are rather just feelings that are passing through her. Doing this helps her challenges feel less overwhelming. While Bell recognizes that mental health struggles look different for everyone, she hopes that by at least sharing her own, she can carry on the conversation about the topic. In a tough industry like entertainment, it’s important to remember that the celebrities we love are people who struggle too.