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Key points
- From the courage of people willing to share their personal accounts, others find hope and encouragement from their struggles.
- Well-known individuals with powerful stories have unprecedented influence to aid the mental health cause.
- The pandemic posed challenges for those facing tough emotions while also expanding opportunities to receive care.
- Bibliotherapy, using quality resources, serves as a psychoeducation tool to enhance awareness and adds treatment value.
In the Summer Olympics, American gymnast Simone Biles decided not to defend her individual all-around gold medal in Tokyo, taking a stand for her mental health. Her story, her focus on what’s going on inside, often less visible to the outer world, is only the latest such revelation by well-known athletes and other individuals.
Olympic boxer Ginny Fuchs opened up to her struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder in Apple TV’s The Me You Can’t See, sharing that this is likely her toughest fight yet. Both hosts of this incredibly informative series—Oprah and Harry, the Duke of Sussex, shared their struggles with trauma and post-traumatic stress as well as how and when they both decided to speak up and seek help.1
Former Olympic medalist Michael Phelps told Time that he got used to compartmentalizing his own struggles,2 and his mother Debbie Phelps, a middle-school principal, explained in Additude magazine how her son harnessed his attention-deficit symptoms to become a swimming record breaker.3
How does this collective courage to share such vulnerability affect the rest of us?
Years ago, speaking out might have had adverse repercussions. According to the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI), Oscar and Emmy-winning actress Patty Duke was once asked why it was so difficult to share one’s personal struggles. She answered reporter Katrina Gay that with having been president of the Screen Actors Guild, with an already successful movie career, many understood her history with bipolar disorder. “I can afford to take these risks,” Duke said. “And if not me, then who will be among the first to step forward?”4
By 2019, NAMI had garnered nearly two dozen ambassadors and supporters, essentially influencers when it came to speaking about mental health, the likes of stand-up comedian Marla Bamford, football player Chris Hubbard, and country singer Naomi Judd. These individuals have a unique capacity to raise public awareness, host events, and alert others to the organization’s mission to recover from and live well with mental illness.
A Pandemic Levels the Field for All
It took two years, according to the sixth installment of the series The Me You Can’t See, for the advisory panel, research, interviews, and filming to culminate in the finished televised product. As the hosts noted, many more individuals and families struggled with a mental health challenge because of the COVID-19 Worldwide Pandemic. For those coping prior to 2020, the Pandemic posed added anxiety, depression, lost livelihoods, cut off from loved ones, grief without closure, and the inability for some to access services.
To be fair, the months of lockdown also made telehealth more acceptable and available, making the delivery of mental health services easier for those with reliable wi-fi and smartphones, computers or tablets to connect. The loosening of restrictions that allowed for telephonic appointments also increased the reach of counseling and therapy.
Media Matters
The Me You Can’t See is powerful television, making it worth a month’s subscription to Apple TV. Hopefully in time, it will be available for all to see, free of cost, via library DVD or download. When one sits with a person’s emotional challenges—encountered face-to-face or via the medium of television—it’s an awareness-raising moment.
Those of us in the mental health field also call this psychoeducation, where people learn about stress, anxiety, depressed mood and other mental health conditions, how to seek help and what skills and treatments help to bring about change. Cognitive-behavioral and family systems counselors often use a didactic approach in therapy sessions to inform. This may include reviewing a list of CBT cognitive errors, specific roles in the family system that get adopted and played out as well as communication skills, relaxation strategies and a better understanding of emotional transmission, cut-off, the differentiation of self and triangulation.
Bibliotherapy Within Arm’s Reach of a Bookshelf
To skeptics, celebrities pen tell-all memoirs to cash in or keep their name before the public. This would admittedly be the cynical interpretation of what more and more readers and mental health clinicians believe are books based in truth, depicting valid symptomatology and recovery culture. We call this bibliotherapy. I for one, recommend many titles to my clients, and often, clients inform me of resources they have found helpful.
The books mentioned here are by far not the only healing additions to a bookshelf. Brooke Shields bravely shared her struggles in Down Came The Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression. Kay Redfield Jamison, M.A., Ph.D., is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University. She has published several good reads, including An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, where Jamison outlined her bipolar disorder and Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.
In my next installment on this topic, I’ll share other poignant portrayals of anxiety, panic, family functioning or dysfunction and addiction.
Copyright @ 2021 by Loriann Oberlin. All Rights Reserved.
Part Two: Celebrities Who Share Their Mental Health and Addictions
