On World Mental Health Day, Good Place star Jameela Jamil revealed in a series of tweets that she tried to kill herself.
She’s beautiful. She’s in a successful TV show. She should be on top of the world. However, Jamil’s confession shows that anyone can fall prey to mental illness.
Jamil, 33, has previously opened up about some “traumatic” experiences in her life, such as anorexia in her teens, a car accident that bound her to bed for a year when she was 17, anxiety, depression, and being raped in her 20s.
The actress then developed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but a type of therapy called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) helped her recover.
In her tweets, she emphasized that for anyone considering taking their own life, there is help available. “Things can turn around,” she tweeted. “I promise.”
“For a long time I had severe PTSD. EMDR pretty much used a magic trick. It removed my trauma,” Jamil told The Sunday Times. “I can remember horrific things and feel like they happened to other people. I couldn’t have kept myself together without it.”
“I’m aware of what it’s like to not be able to go to the toilet by myself, or to be able to breathe because I had asthma, or be able to hear, because I was deaf as a child,” she told Elle in an interview. I also stopped menstruating when I had an eating disorder, so my body has been in jeopardy so many times that I’ve, frankly, by the age of thirty, a little bit late but better late than never, learned to treat it with lots of kindness and respect.”
“I don’t talk sh*t to myself anymore. Every time it crops up I stick up for myself the way that I would for a friend or for a stranger even,” she told Elle. “The things that women say to themselves in their head, they would never tolerate being said to someone that they love. So I’ve decided to be my own best friend.”
If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741-741.
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