Daily US Times: In an interview published Wednesday, former first lady Michelle Obama spoke candidly about her struggles with low-grade depression during the coronavirus pandemic and the challenges of 2020, encouraging Americans to speak more openly about their mental health.
In an interview with People magazine, the former First Lady said: “Depression is understandable in these circumstances, during these times.”
“To think that somehow that we can just continue to rise above all the shock and the trauma and the upheaval that we have been experiencing without feeling it in that way is just unrealistic.”
Michelle Obama said this is one of the reasons why people should need to talk more about mental health because everybody deals with trauma, anxiety, the difficulties in different ways.
The coronavirus pandemic and the economic fallout has brought on a mental health crisis in America. A US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey in August showed that nearly 41% of respondents reported mental health issues stemming from the Covid pandemic.
About 1 in 3 Americans said they had experienced symptoms of depression or anxiety.
Obama revealed on her podcast last summer that she was suffering from “low-grade depression” during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, racial reckoning in the US and political strife.
For the issue’s cover article, Obama told the magazine that she “needed to acknowledge what I was going through, because a lot of times we feel like we have to cover that part of ourselves up, that we always have to rise above and look as if we’re not paddling hard underneath the water.”
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