By Stacy Lee Kong

I first met Michelle Bilodeau in a previous life (hers, not mine). At the time, we were both journalists; I’d recently gone freelance and was starting to focus more intentionally on pop culture, she was a writer and green beauty expert. Since then, though, she has pivoted to a whole new career and is now an Ontario Psychotherapy and Counseling Program student therapist in training and a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying). But of course we’ve stayed in touch, which means when I have a thought about celebrities and mental health, she’s the first person I think of. In fact, that’s what prompted this conversation. A few months ago, we were DMing about SZA’s revelation that she has three therapists. I was confused about why one might need multiple therapists, Michelle had some excellent insight—and I realized I had a friend with specialized expertise who might be interested in having a wider conversation about celebrities, pop culture and mental health with me. And that’s how we got here today! Read on for our chat about therapy speak, how we should be talking about celebrities’ mental health and what mental health discourse can tell us about ourselves.

When SZA gave that interview about having three therapists, I was thinking about it as a question of efficiency. Like, to be the most efficient, I just want one person that I tell all the things to. But you made the good point that people might need different modalities of treatment. And I can't remember if we talked about this, but around the same time, Oprah gave an interview where she was like, ‘I don't need to go to therapy, the show was my therapy.’ Which, I don’t think that’s how that works at all, actually. To me, these conversations highlight a gap in my understanding, though, and that’s why I wanted to talk to you more. Especially in the realm of celebrity, do often see things like that, where the discourse doesn't reflect the reality of how mental health actually works, or what treatment looks like?

That’s so interesting that Oprah thinks that she doesn’t need therapy.

Oprah needs therapy more than anyone.

I think lots of people need therapy. But I want to backtrack a little bit because there are different levels of therapists. There are social workers, there are psychotherapists, there are psychologists and there are psychiatrists, and they all do different things. This is a bit of a generalization, but social work is a lot about family, psychotherapists do a lot of talk therapy, and we can bring in different modalities like EMDR, somatic therapy and stuff like that. Psychologists have PhDs, so they’ve gone to school for seven years and are doing research; they also do various types of therapy depending on what their specialty is. Both psychologists and psychiatrists can diagnose, but only psychiatrists can prescribe medication.

As a psychotherapist, I can't diagnose or prescribe. I can say that I see tendencies and maybe suggest that a patient go to a psychologist or psychiatrist to get a proper diagnosis, but I could never make that call. So that's where someone might have multiple therapists—they might have a psychiatrist, they might have a talk therapist, and there's also different modalities. So like I said, EMDR and somatic therapy are becoming really big things right now. There’s this class in L.A. that’s all about somatic stretching, which is part of somatic therapy. The other part is recognizing that when you have a specific feeling, there is usually an area in your body where it shows up.

Which feels a little woo woo. But maybe that is about me needing to decolonize my own understanding of mental health, because some of the things that I'm seeing in discourse right now—including the idea of somatic therapy—are things that I had been trained, I think, to write off as not ‘real medicine.’

I think in the push to have psychology be taken seriously, there was the separation of mind and body. I read a really fascinating book called Nobody’s Normal, which talks about the rise of mental health and how the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, actually came out of a manual for the military in World War One or World War Two. So, it's interesting that mental health became very specialized in order to be taken seriously. And now, I think we're coming back to this idea that it’s actually holistic—it's mind, body, spirit. The book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk really helped to bring that idea to pop culture; he's one of the people who everyone talks about in psychology right now because he talks about how trauma shows up in the body.

There’s something really interesting to me about the idea of a militarized understanding of mental health, because the military is an institution that’s so white supremacist and patriarchal. It’s about will and mental strength, and how that results in mastery over the body. Meanwhile, when I think about whose bodies are often sites of trauma—women and queer people, and especially racialized people in those groups—their bodies are perceived as unscientific, vulgar, coarse… It feels like there’s a connection between not taking the bodily expressions of mental health seriously and whose experiences are perceived as serious or real.

And if you look to different cultures, and especially Indigenous cultures, there are often a lot of other religions or spirituality [at play]. There's a lot about the body and expression. Take the Māori in New Zealand; when they perform the Haka, those dancers are very grounded and rooted in body and also getting anger out. It feels aggressive, but it’s not. So there's something to be said also, for that separation. [The Western idea is] well, these people are primitive because they feel their emotions and express them in this way.

When I think about pop cultural representations of mental health, the first thing I think of is probably The Sopranos and the way therapy is represented in that show. I’m so curious about what you noticed about how pop culture handled mental health, even before you became a therapist.

I only knew what I saw in front of me. It took me a long time to go to therapy; I don't think I went to therapy until I was in my early 30s, and that was because my dad was sick and I knew I needed some kind of support. I think I felt the way most people do when they’re seeing a therapist—a lot of jokes about the couch, and ‘how does that make you feel’? (Which I say more often than I'd like to admit as a therapist.) Now I definitely feel like there are more nuanced representations of therapists in pop culture, like Shrinking. It’s Harrison Ford and Jason Segel and it's fantastic. It’s a little ‘Hollywood-ized,’ but for the most part, it's such a great show. And years ago, I really loved United States of Tara. And even In Treatment. I've always been fascinated with therapists, but I didn't really know what it would be like until I was in it.

Now that you are in it, how has your perception shifted? Like when we watch as journalists, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, we're like, ‘Oh, you have four months to write one story? Suuuuuure.’ It’s always so funny to see the way our profession has been ‘Hollywood-ized.’ Do you ever feel any of that?

I think so. I think I've always assumed that therapists are super academic, super smart, and that maybe I held back from pursuing therapy when I was in high school because I didn't know if I had the academic chops to do it. Now I've seen therapists are so much more human.

That’s the key lesson of so many things.

Absolutely. The one phrase that kind of gets said over and over again in my program is, “to be a good enough therapist.” I don't have to be perfect. I don't have to be anyone but me. And, I'm going to be a good therapist for the people I am a good therapist for. There are going to be other people that need other things when they go to therapy. That took a while for me to become comfortable with, because I was a bit of a perfectionist in my past life.

Do you think we're good at talking about celebrities’ mental health? Or at least, do you think we've gotten better?

I think we’re getting better, but I don’t think we’re very good. I was thinking about Jonah Hill this morning—he came out with that documentary that I found super fascinating called Stutz, and I think he did a really good job of showing how you can try to do a documentary solely on your therapist, but really you can't separate yourself from it. I love that he was brutally honest about that. But then afterwards, what came out about him was this behaviour he displayed with an ex-girlfriend, and how he used therapy speak to make it seem reasonable. I see some concerning things for me personally on Instagram where a lot of people are using therapy speak: ‘If this person doesn't behave in this way you should cut them off.’ And it’s like… well that might not always be the answer! You might be causing more of a rupture than necessary with something that could be repaired. In therapy, we talk about rupture and repair, and how ruptures can actually be a good thing. They can actually be a way that we can learn about each other. And repair is how we can get back to each other and to a place of connection.

It goes back to what we were saying earlier: In Western society, we are very individualistic. But we've come to learn, especially with the pandemic, we can't live without community. We have to have both in moderation. I see this a lot in North American society, where if someone doesn't behave in a way that we want, or expect, them to, we believe they're all bad, and if they do, we idolize them and think they're all good. But that is splitting, which is a maladaptive defence mechanism that we have from childhood.

One thing that I think complicates the way we talk about celebrities’ mental health is how they talk about their own mental health. So, there are people who have made mental health part of their brand. But there’s a fundamental incompatibility between talking about mental health as a way to make yourself more marketable for capitalism, and actually supporting and protecting your mental health. Demi Lovato is one person who I think of in this case, where we praise their authenticity until it became inconvenient or uncomfortable, and then we judge them for being too authentic. Does that ring true for you?

Yeah, it really does. It’s hard. What I want for my clients is to feel like their most authentic self. The harder part is being comfortable with not everyone being comfortable with your authentic self. We've been taught to be achievers in order to be happy, because we live in a capitalist society. We haven't been taught that just living and being happy is good enough. But we need to be comfortable with being good enough. We can have ambitions and want to strive for stuff, but it’s a one-in-a-million kind of thing to become a Demi Lovato or Selena Gomez. We’re not all going to reach that level of notoriety, nor should we.

There are some celebrities that I'm just not sure how to talk about. Like, how do you talk about Kanye West or Britney Spears without inadvertently doing more harm? Can you?

I think it's really tough. I'm just going to admit I'm biased: I love Britney. I feel so tender towards her. I just want her to be protected at all costs. And then, unfortunately, sometimes when it comes to Kanye, I'm like, ‘Your mental illness doesn't mean that you get to be antisemitic, or scary or abusive, or any of those things.’ And you're right: how do we talk about that? We don’t know what Kanye’s going through, we don’t know what Britney’s going through. I think the one thing that we should all stop doing is assuming that we know who they are as people, because we don't.

It’s funny, in some ways, the person at the centre is the least interesting part to me. Like, I want Britney to just do her dances and whatever makes her happy. I hope she's surrounded by people who actually have her best interests at heart. But what's more fascinating to me is the way people rallied behind her attempts to be free of the conservatorship, and then when she was free, and so many people did not like how she was free.

Yeah, well, that shows other people's biases in terms of what women are allowed to do and not allowed to do, and how free they actually can be. And that's where I think we need to hold multiple ideas at the same time: they're fragile people, and they're famous, and they're human. They're gonna have moments where they are ‘good,’ and they are going to have moments where they’re perceived as ‘bad’ because we don’t like what they’re doing.

Are there benefits to talking about celebrities in the context of mental health, and to paying such close attention to these people in this way?

Absolutely. I think we can de-stigmatize what we've often pathologized. It can be helpful in helping people understand what other people are going through, what people in their life might be going through. I think where it becomes negative is when we assume things about the person based on a diagnosis that they have. Most personality disorders are on a spectrum, so it’s going to affect everyone differently and they’re going to behave differently. One person's ADHD is different from another person's ADHD. And, as a culture, we have to try to start holding nuance. I think that's really what's been lacking in the last 10 to 15 years. When we see people talk about their mental illnesses, sometimes we begin seeing them only as their mental health—but that’s just part of who they are, it's not all of who they are. So, hopefully we can start holding all of those things. Even though it's a lot to ask people to hold. That’s why people feel so comfortable in black and white and good or bad; people like binaries, so it's easier for them.

Is there anything we didn't talk about that you wanted to talk about?

I think, thankfully, we are getting to a place where we're starting to see a variety of examples of what therapists look like, and what mental health challenges look like in pop culture. We’re starting to hopefully have some nuanced understanding beyond what white men go through. And I think that's good. If we can expose ourselves to all of these different types of stories and storytelling, that will hopefully help us be more open to different types of people. We only learn by exposing ourselves to differences of opinions and different experiences.

Do you ever get tired of being like, but many things can be true at once?

Oh, I don't get tired of that because it took me a long time to learn that. Many things can be true at the same time, absolutely. And, I think that is that is also part of the work of being human—to learn how to hold on to that idea.

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