Cara Delevingne Opens Up About Battle With Depression, Suicidal Thoughts

Amongst those who spoke up was Cara Delevingne, model-turned-actress and all-round excellent human being. 

She has talked openly about her teenage struggles with depression before, including in a revealing interview with the UK Telegraph, and over the weekend, at the Women In The World summit, she gave another moving account of the challenges she faced.

“In our culture we are told that if we are beautiful, if we’re skinny, if we’re successful, famous, if we fit in, if everyone loves us, that we’ll be happy,” her speech began. “But, uh that’s not entirely true. And this is what I want to talk about basically.” 

Delevingne read out a poem – written, she explained, at a time when she wasn’t very happy – and explained how the pressure she felt to succeed as a teenager fed into her insecurities. 

She told the interviewer:

“This started when I was about 15 years old. I was at school, I really wanted to do well at school to please my parents, and please my family. I think I pushed myself so far, I got to the point where I had a bit of a mental breakdown. I have very bad learning disabilities so I got to the point where i went a bit mad. I was completely suicidal, didn’t want to live any more, I thought that i was completely alone.” 

“I also realised 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 that death, which is completely insane. So I got taken out of school, put into therapy, put on to antidepressants. Clawed my way back to some sort of rational thought, which took a while. I stayed in school till I was 17, still plagued by this depression.”

 

Sorry I missed world mental health day but watch my talk I did @WomenintheWorld https://t.co/9wARfpLsb2 #WorldMentalHealthDay

— Cara Delevingne (@Caradelevingne) October 11, 2015

You can read Cara’s poem below: