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30-year-old actress Amanda Seyfried, known for her roles in Les Miserables and Mamma Mia, recently conducted an extremely candid interview about her mental health and spoke out against the stigma that continues to surround mental health today.
Although millions of people in America take antidepressants, there is still a vast number of people who fear the judgment they’ll receive if they seek out help for their mental illnesses.
Seyfried has no patience for the people who continue to look down upon others who need “tools” to handle their mental illnesses.
“It’s coping with life…you go to the doctor about heart problems, or an eye doctor if you have an infection, you have to take care of yourself. Mental health is so segregated,” she explained. “You don’t necessarily have to have something chemically wrong with your brain to have mental health issues.”
Seyfried herself has always been candid and open about her own mental health. She has OCD and takes Lexapro to help her handle the anxiety that comes with having OCD.
“I’ll never get off of [Lexapro],” she declared. “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.”
In her perspective, there’s no reason to get off a medication for mental illness – particularly not if the desire to get off medication is simply in response to people who perceive mental illness differently from other illnesses.
“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,” she stated.
We so admire and appreciate Seyfried’s honesty about such a difficult topic.
