Opening UpDove Cameron Speaks Out About Mental Health Issues: Everything She’s Ever Said

Mental Health Day

Dove tweeted a sweet message to her fans a day after Mental Health Day in October 2022. “I know I’m late for world mental health day but wanted to say that the way society has been built up until this point is exactly incongruent with how human beings are meant to be cared for,” she wrote.

“If you feel disillusioned 24/7, you are not alone. There is so much fear and hate and lack of community, more and more every day. If you struggle with depression, anxiety, if you’ve dealt with symptoms of trauma or ptsd, if you feel listless and lost in it most days, I see you. We are invisibly connected. There is so much to say about mental health and how it is synonymous with being alive, but what I want to say most is: you are not made wrong.”

She continued, “I wish I could reach through the screen and hold your hand, we could sit together quietly. There is space for you here on this earth, exactly as you, even on the days where you only hear that in an echo chamber of your own pain. You are wanted. You are held. You are worthy of a life you do not have to suffer through. There is a life for you here. And I’ll always be here to remind you, and remind myself. I love you.”

Discussing her ‘Identity’

“The self is someone I feel I have always deeply known, someone I deeply love and protect, like my own child, I know this self and we are very close,” Dove shared via Instagram in May 2022. “For me, identity and the self have always been diametrically opposed, and there has only ever been room for one at a time to occupy my life. I have never been able to make them hold hands, and I realize as I get older, it’s because I hold a deep-seeded belief that who I am is wrong, I am not allowed to be just as I am, I am not meant to be here. I feel I must be something else if I am going to be allowed to be here. And I really do wanna be here with you.”

She continued, in part, writing, “So far, the self and the identity seem to harm each other, in my personal experience. I’m feeling it out. And if you are too, we can do it together.”

Taking About Her Career

“Tears of overwhelm! I’m feeling a lot tonight, I’m feeling A LOT!! Firstly, I am so ecstatic to be here with you. I’m happy to be alive. It’s very intense here. I’m feeling everything all at once and I can barely contain it. It’s good!! It’s painful!! I’m writing a lot of music right now. I’m excited to share it with you, all my feelings about this,” the actress wrote in a January 2021 Instagram post. “Transitions are nuts and I’m really really here . I feel so much love that it hurts me. I love you. Thank you. Please allow yourselves to grieve and cry and scream and strip naked and run and dance and truly express because this life is FAST and it’s ALL AVAILABLE TO US if we are brave enough to believe we deserve it!! Healing is not linear but it does come.”

Sharing Advice

“Say it with me: we are not in the business of harming ourselves,” she wrote on Twitter in February 2021. “This applies to mental, emotional and physical harm. Any time you sense yourself dipping into a harmful or self hating thought pattern, recognize it as a form of SELF HARM, and say ‘I am not in the business of harming myself.’ Breathe, forgive yourself and redirect your energy.”

Dove continued, “I do this every day at least 10 times a day. What you say to yourself matters, and the content of your thoughts effects everything in your life. It gets easier with practice.”

Being Honest With Fans

After announcing her split from Thomas Doherty in December 2020, the actress took to Twitter and told fans, “Some nights are hard, and that’s OK. I hope you are happy wherever you are. And if you’re not, you can come sit by me. I love you. We’re on the path.”

“It’s an industry of creatives, but not entirely made of start-ups and creativity. I opened my heart and all my ventricles, all of my sensitive spots, to this space that’s the wild wild west in terms of what you’re going to receive. And I just f–ked myself,” she shared with Story + Rain Magazine in September 2020. “I was too young and too bullheaded to be shielding myself from what I thought was going to be, my safest place ever. I made a lot of stupid decisions: ‘Here I am, this is the new me.’ And I delved into a terrible relationship. I was very anorexic for a long time. I was doing everything I could to create a safe space for myself within a place I felt was a new home, and that wasn’t smart, you know? It really came down to my age when I entered, I think.”

Talking About Experiencing Loss

“When someone loses their life, that’s not my loss. He lost his life. I know that that affects me, but I would never take on that loss as my own,” she told Puss Puss Magazine in July 2020. “I guess I feel that there’s such a deep, great tragedy to being alive in general that it’s sort of everywhere. I feel like once you lose somebody close to you, you can’t really ever un-feel that.”

The actress also defined loss as, “sort of a permanent thumbprint on your heart or like a burn or something like that. It changes your world perspective. I carry those things with me, but for me, the pain lies with that individual person and the life that they should have had.”

She continued, “To be completely honest, I wake up and [loss is] the first thing on my mind. It’s constantly in the back of my mind in everything I do. I have to kind of be like, okay, nothing crazy is going to happen today. Like, the other shoes not about to drop, because a big sort of results of chronic trauma and chronic PTSD is that you always think that whatever has happened in the past is about to happen again at any given moment. So I kind of have to get myself out of that space daily by just doing stuff.”

Being ‘Dark’

“Nobody ever believes me when I say this, so I always say this kind of defeated, but I am, like, a dark person,” she told Travis Mills on Apple Music in May 2020. “I always have been. And I just ended up with a career path that was very shiny.”

She continued, “I never felt like I needed to project anything. And I really thought people would just authentically receive who I was, but it doesn’t really happen in the industry. You kind of have to brand yourself and really communicate with people if they are going to respond to that. And so I think all of these years, I thought I was being received for the person that I am, and it really shocked me to see how much people don’t really know that side of me.”

Discussing Her Mental Health

“I’m so open and so fragile that I feel like the world just permeates me all the time and that results in anxiety and depression and confusion and loneliness and ups and downs of being like, ‘Wow, I feel so safe — I want to eat it all, I want to meet you all, I want to love.’ And, then I’m like, ‘I need to shave my head and move away and never talk to anyone ever again,’” she told Entertainment Tonight in April 2020. “It’s a day-to-day experience. Two days ago, I had a massive breakdown. I was like, ‘Humans aren’t meant to be cooped up!’ This is the ultimate experience [where] you can’t distract yourself from yourself, so that affects everybody differently. For me, it’s really up and down.”

Processing Her Feelings

“Because we’re all in the same experience it’s so easy to compare,” she said during an April 2020 interview with Build Series. “I just figure, if I’m going to have this massive following, that I somehow stumbled upon having, I want to be the girl that if I was 13 or 15 or, f–k it, my age, I want to be somebody that if they already look to me — I don’t want to be that person that they look to and think ‘Oh they have it all together, so I’m going to make myself have it all together.’ Because that becomes so toxic so quickly. I want people to know that I don’t have it all together and that I’m so sad somedays and that I’m struggling to get through my day to make it more accessible, so that they can feel that way. So, they can talk about it and we can all process together.”

Talking About Self-Care

“Healing is not always pretty. Self-care is not always face masks and fancy oils (though there’s nothing wrong with that),” she captioned an Instagram post from April 2020. “For me: self-care right now is trauma work, writing, face time therapy, daily talks with myself about the acceptance of my life and my current state, attempting to stay physically healthy and not let my depression and anxiety win, and practicing patience. Getting out of shape, and being ok with that. Being on my phone all day when I wanted to spend time reading and baking, and being ok with that, and trying again tomorrow.”

She continued, “Self-care for me in this time, is following what I NEED, not what I’ve imagined this time looking like in my head or comparing how productive everyone else is being, and being ok with facing myself in all of my painful, messy and sometimes insufferable struggle with my mind. And, some face masks and fancy oils.”

Talking About Her Relationship

“I think this culture is so insidious for what is allowed for a woman, especially a developing young woman,” she told ET in April 2020. “I wanted my boyfriend to think I was, like, good and beautiful and pure and that I wasn’t a bad girl, because bad girls get punished. As I’ve gotten older, I’m like, f–k it. It took me a long time to stop feeling so bad about myself [and like] I needed the approval of everybody, and to start being like, ‘I only care about my own approval.’”

Feeling Sad

“I’m pretty sad. Have been for a while, I think, and that’s OK,” she wrote on Twitter in March 2020. “If you’re sad, remember you’re not alone. Everyone is human. Objectifying others and ourselves is so deep in our current culture, we forget that, no matter what it looks like and what we think we know, we don’t know what someone is going through. We all hurt. Let’s help each heal.”

“My earliest years in the industry were some of the best years of my life, while also being some of my worst and an unbelievable uphill battle. I definitely had a lot of fun, experimenting with who I was, what my abilities were, falling in love for the first time and navigating this entirely new world that I was now, all of a sudden, involved in,” the actress explained during a Create & Cultivate interview in January 2020. “While this was happening, I was also dealing with the death of my father, severe anorexia and bulimia, anxiety relating to newfound fame and global attention and what would eventually become an incredibly unhealthy relationship.”

Coping With Anxieties

“I would call myself incredibly anxious, and I have dealt with depression. And I do have episodes of absolutely what feels like mania or something that is like I’m all of a sudden in the pits of despair. I can’t get myself out. I’m on the floor and I’m crying,” she told Seventeen Magazine in July 2019. “I was scared when I was younger to talk about certain topics because there are a lot of people in this industry that tell you not to speak about a lot of things. Then as you get older you’re kind of like, wait, no, maybe I know better. Maybe I don’t care about what you think. Maybe the risk is much less important than the gain. And I think so much normalcy would come from demystifying a lot in our own personal lives for younger people to look at.”