Health

Amanda Seyfried Opens up About the Quiet Struggle of Having an Invisible Illness

October 18th 2016

Actress Amanda Seyfried discussed her struggles with obsessive compulsive disorder in a new interview with Allure and lamented that people don't always take mental illness as seriously as physical illness.

Seyfried plans on taking the anti-anxiety and antidepressant drug Lexapro for the rest of her life to remain mentally healthy, she told the magazine. She added she wouldn't stop her medication just because there's a stigma about mental illness and the medications associated with treating it.

"Whether it's placebo or not, I don't want to risk it," Seyfried said. "And what are you fighting against? Just the stigma of using a tool?"

Mental illness belongs in the same category as other conditions, Seyfried said.

"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. You don't see the mental illness: It's not a mass; it's not a cyst. But it's there. Why do you need to prove it? If you can treat it, you treat it."

Seyfried has had a lot of health fears as a result of her obsessive thinking patterns. She confessed that recognizing that her compulsive thoughts were not rooted in reality helped her cope a great deal.

Seyfried's comments reflect a larger movement to get people to take mental illness more seriously.

ATTN: reported last year about the following comic, which highlights the unfair way people sometimes deal with those suffering from mental illness.

The comic shows characters berating people with physical illnesses, such as the flu, and telling them to just snap out of it. These are the kinds of comments that people with mental illness sometimes hear, and the comic shows just how unhelpful and unkind such remarks can be:

ROBOT HUGSROBOT HUGS - robot-hugs.com

Read the full Allure interview here.

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