- Kristen Bell is getting candid about her struggles with mental health.
- The actress told Self that she first experienced anxiety and depression in college: “It was just a generalized dark cloud over me.”
- Bell, 40, says she’s finding the right tools to help her through hard days.
Kristen Bell is no stranger to opening up about her mental health. But in the wake of the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when far too many of us experienced our own crises, the actress is getting even more candid about her struggles stemming back decades—and how she’s coping with tough days.
Bell’s first experience with anxiety and depression came at age 18, when she left Michigan to study acting in New York City. “I wasn’t suicidal,” the Frozen actress told Self, but “it was just a generalized dark cloud over me. I felt like my real personality was in a tiny cage inside my body.”
“‘Why do I feel terrible and exhausted every day?’” Bell, 40, recalls asking herself back then.
Bell’s mother, a registered nurse, helped her out of that initial spiral, The Good Place actress explains, pushing her to try SSRI medication and revealing a family history of anxiety and depression. Another lifeline was walking; Bell would take long strolls around the city to clear her mind.
Those simple solutions—medication and exercise, plus a few extra mindfulness hacks she picked up along the way—helped the actress find her way from unknown college student to household name. “I am someone who has to check myself,” Bell told Today in 2019. “Sometimes, if I’m feeling really low, [I] make a checklist of good and bad things in my life to see if it’s my mental state or if we really have a problem.”
“I know that I present someone who is very bubbly and happy all the time, and a lot of the time I am, because I have really good tools,” Bell continued in her Self interview. But when COVID-19 hit, she found herself in a “mental zone that wasn’t healthy for my family to be around.”
This time, it was her husband, Dax Shephard, who helped her find a way through: “‘Are you helping anyone right now by sitting and crying in your bed, or are you just being self-indulgent?’” Bell remembers him saying. “‘Either get up and donate money or donate your time,’” he said, or “‘come out here and be a good mom and a good wife and a good friend, and live your life in honor of the suffering that happens in the world.’”
She was outraged at first, but realized the truth behind her husband’s words, prompting her to help their daughters, Lincoln, 8, and Delta, 6, navigate the stresses of the pandemic, too. The actress also picked up new penchants for knitting and completing puzzles during the past year, she noted, which offer moments of peace in an otherwise busy family schedule.
Quarantine also took a toll on Bell and Shepard’s marriage: “This is as physically close as we’ve been in a couple of days because we’ve just found each other revolting,” she said with a laugh during an Instagram Live interview last April. But thanks in part to couples therapy and some brutal honesty about their lives—Shepard even revealed that Bell “saved” his life when he relapsed last summer—they’re still going strong.
For now, Bell is working to make sure that her fans know they aren’t alone in grappling with their mental health. “I still have this desire, this knee-jerk, to present perfection,” she explained to Self. But she feels she has “a responsibility … to try and make the world a safer, better place for other human beings.”
If you or someone you know is at risk, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or text HOME to 741741 to message with a trained crisis counselor from the Crisis Text Line for free.
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Jake Smith, an editorial fellow at Prevention, recently graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in magazine journalism and just started going to the gym. Let's be honest—he's probably scrolling through Twitter right now.
