Last November, I was on the red carpet at BravoCon when I approached Summer House stars Amanda Batula and Ciara Miller and asked them to share one small thing that has changed their lives. They didn’t miss a beat. “Prozac,” the reality stars answered in unison.
Batula went on to divulge her dosage — 10 milligrams. “Oh, I’m at 50,” Miller admitted. But neither felt any shame about taking an antidepressant. “We’re two depressed girls just out here thriving,” Batula told me.
That sort of transparency about mental health would have been startling not so long ago, but it’s becoming increasingly common for celebrities to spill the details on what’s in their medicine cabinet. “Brought to you … by Lexapro,” Kelsea Ballerini captioned an Instagram post in October. Singer Hayley Williams named one of her new tracks “Mirtazapine,” an ode to her “genie in a screw-top bottle.” On Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast in June, Dakota Johnson quipped, “I take supplements — like Xanax.” In an interview with the New Yorker, Jennifer Lawrence opened up about being prescribed Zurzuvae to treat her postpartum depression, while Presley Gerber, son of Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber, took to Instagram to discuss the medications he’s taking for his mental health. Reality star Gabby Windey of The Bachelorette and Traitors fame put it a bit more casually: It’s “Lamictal girl fall,” she declared in a November Instagram post that included a picture of her pill case.
Dr. Sarah Oreck, a reproductive psychiatrist and the CEO and cofounder of Mavida Health, is used to discussing psychiatric medications behind closed doors. But those conversations have become more public over the last few years, she tells Yahoo.
“I just started to notice it post-pandemic,” Oreck says. “People used to talk about treatment very vaguely. And then all of a sudden, people were naming drugs. That never used to happen.” Oreck likens the moment to Kylie Jenner revealing her breast implant size on Instagram, which became a pop culture inflection point that signaled a new kind of candor. Even Oprah Winfrey’s honesty about being on a GLP-1 for weight loss is comparable. “It’s like, OK, we’re going to be really real now.”
That transparency — not just alluding to dealing with mental health issues but naming specific solutions, without shame — matters to Jayme Cyk, the writer behind the Substack I’m On An Antidepressant and cofounder of the supplement brand And Repeat.
“It’s really interesting how the conversation started with, ‘I’m taking something to help me feel better,’ to ‘I’m on antidepressants,’ to getting a little bit more scientific,” Cyk tells Yahoo. “Seeing people be like, ‘I’m on Prozac,’ ‘I’m on Zoloft,’ feels just like an extra layer that is even more open than anyone has ever been on the internet around what they’re taking and the actual benefits.”
What’s also striking is that the response to these medication disclosures is largely one of acceptance and relatability, not controversy and stigma. When Brooke Shields wrote about being prescribed the antidepressant Paxil after struggling with postpartum depression in her 2005 memoir, she was berated by Tom Cruise for spreading “misinformation.” (He has since apologized, according to Shields.) More recently, Amanda Seyfried made headlines in 2017 when she defended her decision to stay on Lexapro, which she takes for her obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), during pregnancy. Such admissions are now met with less scrutiny and more nonchalance.
Cyk has been on Prozac since she was 9 years old, but didn’t feel comfortable opening up about it until adulthood. Hearing more people in the public sphere talk about their own experiences would have made a difference, she says.
“I had a lot of shame around it because nobody was talking about antidepressants,” she says. “It wasn’t until I was actually 18 that I started to take it every day and realize that this was something that helped me. So it’s something that has always been top of mind, but it’s not something that I actually started to speak to other people about until I was probably in my early 30s.”
At its core, the shift toward naming medications is about destigmatization. But it’s also about education. For many people, antidepressants are not only abstract but also serious, clinical or vaguely ominous. Hearing a familiar name attached to a familiar face, like Johnson mentioning Xanax, can cut through that fear.
“It gives people a reference point,” says Oreck. “If you’ve never heard of a medication before, it can feel experimental or scary. But once you hear the name, especially more than once, it starts to feel real. Not just something your doctor is trying out on you.”
That reference point can have a tangible, real-world impact. Oreck recalls prescribing Zurzuvae, a newer FDA-approved medication for postpartum depression, to patients who were hesitant simply because they didn’t recognize the name. That changed after Lawrence spoke publicly about taking it.
“One of my patients told me, ‘I’m embarrassed to say this, but it wasn’t until I heard Jennifer Lawrence talk about it that I finally felt OK taking it,’” Oreck says. “She knows Jennifer Lawrence is doing well. She’s successful, she’s visible, she’s functioning. It becomes a real-life model of what life can look like on the other side.”
In online discussions, particularly on Reddit, people are increasingly seeking out celebrity reference points of their own. One came from a musician who wanted to know whether any well-known artists had spoken openly about taking the medication they were about to start. They wanted to know how it might affect their creativity. Some commenters pointed to Williams’s song about her own experience on the antidepressant mirtazapine. Another thread led to people sharing multiple names of famous figures who have spoken explicitly about taking Zoloft.
This is how celebrity disclosures move beyond relatability into reassurance. For people who have only encountered antidepressants through hushed conversations, that kind of visibility can come off as permission to explore their own options of getting help, if needed.
“As we continue to recognize the names, recognize that there’s a dosage involved, we get further into being like, these aren’t things to be afraid of,” says Cyk. “These are things that are helpful, and you’ll have your own experience with them, but know that we can all talk about it to help energize the person to not feel so afraid of taking them.”
That visibility does come with risks, Oreck adds. “It’s a double-edged sword,” she says, specifically when someone feels emotionally connected to a public figure and decides that the drug they’ve named is the best fit for them too.
“People just have to have a more nuanced approach, like, ‘That’s so cool that they said that. Let me ask my doctor to see if it’s a good fit for me,’ vs. demanding Prozac because Ciara on Summer House uses it,” says Oreck.
This is where more transparency, more voices and more naming of different tools and prescriptions should come into play, according to Cyk. “We hear the term antidepressants all the time, but if you don’t take one, do you necessarily know all these different names? … I don’t know if people know that there isn’t one that’s going to work for everyone,” she says.
To her, the broader the conversation, the more options that people have to help guide them in the right direction, rather than being indicative of what someone should take. Cyk is also adamant that those on antidepressants aren’t obligated to talk about it.
“It’s not like everybody needs to scream at the top of their lungs about what specific antidepressants they’re taking,” says Cyk. “If you can at least say that you are taking something, that’s just gonna help a lot of people overall. But when we talk about the brand name of what you’re actually taking, it breaks the stigma even further.”
