Bella Hadid details her ‘excruciating’ mental health struggles

Bella Hadid says her mental health struggles are to blame for why she hasn’t used a personal stylist “in a long time.”

Speaking to WSJ Magazine, the 25-year-old supermodel revealed she was “in such a weird place mentally” that it was really complicated for her “to get out of the house and put an outfit together, especially with the anxiety of [photographers] being outside and all of that.”

“In the last year, it was really important for me to learn that even if people talk about my style or if they like it or if they don’t, it doesn’t matter, because it’s my style,” she continued. “When I leave the house in the morning, what I think about is: Does this make me happy? Do I feel good in this and do I feel comfortable?”

The Victoria’s Secret model previously opened up about her mental health via Instagram last year, revealing that she has “suffered from extreme depression and anxiety” for most of her teenage and adult life.

“My social anxiety was something that slowly crept up on me as I grew into my twenties,” she wrote at the time. “It got harder for me to go out without having one drink to calm my nerves, which made me not want to go out at all, so I was just hibernating between jobs.”

She added, “With a life that is constantly pushing a social regime, along with working 13 hour days, every single day, I knew this wasn’t a sustainable life for me.”

Hadid also explained to WSJ why she decided last November to post a series of selfies of herself crying.

“I would have really depressive episodes and my mom or my doctor would ask how I was and instead of having to respond in text, I would just send them a photo,” she said. “It was the easiest thing for me to do at the time because I was never able to explain how I was feeling.”

“I would just be in excruciating and debilitating mental and physical pain, and I didn’t know why. That was over the past three years,” she revealed, adding that when she posted the pics, it was “to make sure that anybody that was feeling that way knew it was OK to feel that way.”

Hadid told the outlet that she hopes her followers know that while things “look so beautiful” on Instagram, “at the end of the day, we are all cut from the same cloth.”

“I felt like it was just good for me to be able to speak my truth,” she explained. “And at some point I wasn’t able to post nice pretty pictures anymore. I was over it.”

Hadid confessed to having good days and bad days, but said she has no regrets about how much she’s shared on social media.

“Walking outside, being able to remember there are so many people going through things and have similar patterns to me, it makes me feel better,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s not what people want on Instagram, and that’s fine. I don’t have to be on Instagram forever. I feel like real is the new real, and that’s what’s important to me.”