Amanda Seyfried kept her OCD to herself because she feared she "wasn’t normal".
The ‘Mamma Mia’ star has continued to open up about living with obsessive compulsive disorder and is pleased there is "so much less stigma" about mental health now than there was when she was young.
She told W magazine: "I feel like there’s so much less stigma about everything, like mental health. If I’d only known when I was obsessive-compulsive about stuff when I was 10, I would have shared it with my parents and not thought that I was crazy. But I thought I was crazy. You can’t step on this tile or … all those weird superstitions.
"You would share it with people and they would help you out and make you feel better about it. They’d say, ‘That’s really normal. Don’t worry. That’s just your anxiety running high and trying to control it.’ That could have saved ten years of my life feeling that I wasn’t normal. I really hope the younger generations are hopefully feeling safer in being who they are."
And the 30-year-old actress – who is expecting her first child with fiancé Thomas Sadoski – previously opened up about how she uses antidepressant Lexapro to help her control it.
She said: "I’ve been on it since I was 19, so 11 years. I’m on the lowest dose. I don’t see the point of getting off of it. Whether it’s placebo or not, I don’t want to risk it. And what are you fighting against? Just the stigma of using a tool? A mental illness is a thing that people cast in a different category (from other illnesses), but I don’t think it is. It should be taken as seriously as anything else."
Amanda Seyfried feared she wasn’t normal
