Comedian Elyse Myers wakes at 4:00 a.m. to post social media content. She has over 4 million followers. What does she talk about? Her personal struggles with ADHD, anxiety, and depression.

A year after she posted her first video, according to People magazine, she has become “perhaps the best-known mental health advocate on TikTok, due to her “relatable, actionable videos.” Her goal is to create a safe space for young people to talk about their struggles, the kind she wishes she’d had when she was younger. Her philosophy is that talking about mental health “should be as easy as talking about what you had for lunch.”

She had her first panic attack at age 7. Her family was not a stable one. Her parents separated when she was born, and anxiety was a companion throughout her young life. In sixth grade, she first started going to therapy for her anxiety and depression, Elyse explains, and “I ended up getting diagnosed with ADHD at the same time, which helped me understand where a lot of the anxiety was coming from. And then I started getting medicated, which was really awesome, and really helpful for me. I was in therapy pretty much from then on. I never stopped.”

She describes therapy as “a place that I can say all of the things that I feel like I can’t say…. Most of the time, the thoughts that you think in your brain are not the truth, and so I think if you have a space that is safe enough to say them out loud [to] a person who knows how to deal with them…that’s really important.”

Her advice to young people? “I want to encourage people: It’s never too early to start talking about how you’re feeling and your mental health — even if you don’t have the right words to describe how you’re feeling, talk about the color of what it looks like, talk about where you feel it in your body, anything that you can to point to what you’re feeling.”

She explained that along the way, someone asked her to explain her anxiety and she couldn’t. But when she was asked, “What shape is it?” or “What color is it?”, it “really helped me understand when I couldn’t this huge, scary monster of anxiety or depression.”

Myers encourages young people to open up – the sooner the better – to find someone they can trust who won’t judge them for struggling. Mental health conditions have been part of her life, but they do not define her. She refuses to be ashamed: “Being able to weave my mental health struggles, both past and present, into my stories makes it not weird. It makes it just a part of the story.”

Grossman Kantor, Wendy. “Why Elyse Myers’ Mental Health Content Is Dominating Your FYP: It’s ‘Not Weird, It’s Just a Part of the Story.’” People, 07 June 2022, https://people.com/human-interest/elyse-myers-tiktok-mental-health-story/.

Photo credit: Elyse Myers’ official TikTok