National Recovery Month: Ellen Degeneres was deeply depressed after coming out, turned to meditation to fight it
It's 2020 and members of the LGBTQ+ community are still not free of judgment and stigma. There definitely has been a shift in the way people view the community and speak about them, however, we still hear news about the community facing discrimination, been subjected to mean jabs, attacks, in some cases their basic rights being stripped off.
To give an example, it was as late as 2015 where the Supreme Court struck down all bans across all states countrywide, on same-sex marriages and that's very telling. Research has proved that the LGBTQ+ community as compared to others are more likely to experience mental health disorders. So how would it have been for the talk show host Ellen DeGeneres who came out to society before the millennium and before social media, the advent of which considerably helped in trying to break down the stigma around homosexuality? The TV personality has suffered from a life-altering mental disorder: depression, ever since she came out. September is National Recovery Month and here's a look at Ellen's journey with the dreaded D-word and her recovery.
"For a long time, there was a lot of fear that being gay was going to influence people’s opinions about me and so I didn’t ever have the confidence I should have had. Because whenever you carry shame around, you just can’t possibly be a confident person," Ellen told USA Today in 2018. There were a lot of talks that were happening around her coming out and people assumed she was speaking about it too much, so much so that Elton John asked her to "Shut up already. We know you’re gay. Be funny."
In the same interview, she also had opened up about how her feelings were hurt as people went ahead to make jokes at her expense after which she ended up "really depressed." Her sitcom 'Ellen' was canceled a year after she came out and she was viewed as a failure and she ended up with no agent and no possibility of a job. "I had nothing," she told the outlet.
At the same time, she was looked at as a leader in the LGBTQ+ community, something that she never wanted. She just wanted to be a comedian and people judged her for it saying she wasn't doing enough for the community and all of this weighed down on her considerably. "If you ever have experienced depression, you isolate yourself and don’t reach out for help. You don’t say, ‘I’m hurting, I need help’ – you kind of crawl further into that dark hole, so that’s where I was for a while," she told the outlet.
Speaking about her recovery, she said she fought back by harnessing the power of meditation, therapist, and anti-depressants. “I fought back against it through meditation and being quiet. I started seeing a therapist and had to go on anti-depressants for the first time in my life. I slowly started to climb out of it. I can’t believe I came back from that point. I can’t believe where my life is now," she said.
September 2020 marks the 31st year of National Recovery Month and with this column, we aim to tell the share the experiences of public figures and celebrities with mental disorders, with an aim to raise awareness and normalize asking for help.