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Health
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I’ve called plenty of people weirdoes in my life: the boy who picked his nose and ate glue in second grade, the dude who thought lifting my skirt made for a plausible pick-up scheme and the woman on my block who leaves her windows open and cat food on the sill to lure stray cats into her apartment.
Kirsten Dunst thinks a lot of people are weird, too. Chiefly: people with persistently sunny dispositions who have never been depressed a day in their lives.
While promoting her latest role as deeply depressed woman, Justine, in the new Lars von Trier film, Melancholia, Dunst recently told Canadian fashion magazine Flaunt that she thinks going through the mood disorder is perfectly normal. “I have experienced depression. Many people have,” she said.
"People are embarrassed to talk about it," said the 29-year-old actress, who struggled with her own bout of depression in 2008. "I would never put anyone down [who] was in that kind of space. I think most human beings go through some sort of depression in their life," she says. "And if they don't, I think that's weird."
Dunst hopes that opening up about her own struggles will help remove the stigma of the mental illness. In the September issue of British Elle, she talked about her stint at the Cirque Lodge rehab facility in Utah, where she was treated for depression. At the time, rumors circulated that she was admitted for alcohol or substance abuse.
“My friends and family were put in a position where they had to defend me, and it was an awful time," she recalls to Black Book Mag.
Though she might be the latest, Dunst isn’t the first celebrity to admit to mental health issues. Angelina Jolie, Christina Ricci and Catherine Zeta-Jones have all publicly battled depression. While it might be hard to believe that these dazzling and successful woman could go through such dark and trying times, Dunst is right: depression is not abnormal. A recent report from the Centers for Disease and Prevention claims that half of Americans will suffer from some form of mental illness in their lifetime. With those kinds of statistics, it’s fairly obvious that depression and other emotional health troubles don’t simply plague the weak. They happen to most of us. Those who escape unscathed, well, I won’t go so far as to call them weird. Annoying? Maybe. Blessed? Most definitely.
