Illeana D'Cruz bravely talks about her Mental Illness

Illeana D'Cruz Bravely Talks About Her Mental Illness & There's A Lot To Be Learned From How She Dealt With It

Shobhita Dutt

August 27, 2016

It's great to see Bollywood celebrities these days openly talking about their lives and their problems, and letting their fans know that they're also normal people just like them. Remember how Deepika Padukone had spoken in detail about her depression problem? After her, now Illeana D'Cruz has spoken about her anxiety and depression problem and how she dealt with it.
In a recent interview to Miss Malini, Illeana spoke at length about how she was dealing with mental illness for more than a decade, and how she's now at a better place and she's dealing with it all gracefully. She spoke about how she's been struggling with depression for years now.

She said, "The most difficult struggle for me has been personally, because I've been dealing with a lot of issues. [I'm dealing with] a lot of issues as far as my body is concerned. I'll be turning 30 this year, and I know I've been dealing with it for over 10-12 years, maybe even 15, but I never really knew what it was. I finally went to somebody a few months ago and she sort of helped me out."

She also spoke about how one needs a support system around them to deal with it.

She added, "There was a time I didn't want to get out of the house - I used to get really emotional, I used to sit in a corner and just cry for hours. And I didn't even want to go out to get groceries, that's how bad it was. It can be really consuming if you let it get there. The pretty shitty thing about it is that only you can help yourself, but it helps having a great support system around you. I actually read something about what Deepika [Padukone] put up recently - I didn't know she went through it - she said that it was the support that got her out of it."

She said, "I apparently have Body Dysmorphic Disorder. I didn't know that. When I told my therapist, she was like what', and then she said, hang on, I think you have this thing - and then I googled it and I said makes sense.' You get fixated on one body part, and you're just obsessed with how much you don't like it. That's pretty much it for me. But I've reached a point where it's like - I mean, it's who I am.

The people you see on magazine covers, they're touched up, slimmed down, covered up. And there's no such thing as a perfect body type - they go on about how the hourglass is the perfect body type, then the next year it'll be the athletic type. What are you going to do, change your body type every year? Just be happy, be healthy."

She also talked about how she had to look 'put together' all the time when she was dealing with depression.

She said, "I have really emotional moments and it's something I only realized recently. I'd wake up sometimes and I'd just cry, and I'm thinking of the most hopeless scenarios, and then I'm like why am I thinking about that?' If I can be completely honest with you, I had a really shit day today. I woke up and I was feeling shitty, and I didn't know what to do, and I sent [a friend] a message saying I really need a friend, can I call you?' She was at work, but she thankfully answered the phone and spoke to me for an hour, then I told her I have to go get ready because I'm going to be live on camera in like 2 hours. They're going to see me looking like shit! I may be lucky that I have a job where I'm supposed to look amazing, I'm supposed to look like there's nothing going on with my life, so it sort of pulls me out of it and distracts me. But a distraction is just a temporary stop on it, it's not a final something. So it's not easy. I don't know how much to say about it because I don't know how to get through it."