The Enchantress of 'Suicide Squad' bares it all in a new magazine interview as she discusses the low point of her life.
- Aug 5, 2016
AceShowbiz - Cara Delevingne poses in her birthday suit in a steamy spread for Esquire UK magazine. In her interview, the "Suicide Squad" actress talks about her teenage years when she was battling depression while her mother was struggling with drug addiction.
"I think I properly started dealing with depression when I was about 16," she begins her story, "when all the stuff with my family started to make sense and came to the surface. I'm very good at repressing emotion and seeming fine. As a kid I felt like I had to be good and I had to be strong because my mum wasn't. So, when it got to being a teenager and all the hormones and the pressure and wanting to do well at school - for my parents, not for me - I had a mental breakdown."
"I was suicidal," she opens up. "I couldn't deal with it any more. I realised how lucky and privileged I was, but all I wanted to do was die. I felt so guilty because of that and hated myself because of that, and then it's a cycle. I didn't want to exist anymore. I wanted for each molecule of my body to disintegrate. I wanted to die."
The model-turned-actress reveals how she smashed her head into a tree to knock herself out and scratched her legs until they bled. She was taken out of school at 16 and went on medication. "I hate meds," she says. "I think they saved my life and they've probably saved my mother's life but I don't agree with them. It's so easy to abuse them."
She felt "numb" when she was on medication. "I didn't feel s**t. It was horrible. I was like a sociopath. When something was funny I would go, 'Ha ha!' just because other people laughed, but then I'd stop immediately because I wasn't really very good at faking it. And I was a pretty horny teenager right up until I got to 16, when I stopped having any sexual feelings for anyone. I missed out a lot from 16 to 18," she reveals.
She stopped taking medication at 18, "And that week, I lost my virginity, I got into fights, I cried, I laughed," she adds. "It was the best thing in the world to feel things again. And I get depressed still but I would rather learn to figure it out myself rather be dependant on meds, ever."
Cara is now in a better place, but she's still haunted by her depression. "In a sense, I always feel like when I get depressed, it's very narcissistic, right? Because you can't stop thinking about your own problems. But at the same time it's not. Because you hate yourself. So it's a very weird thing to feel ... Especially when I started becoming successful, obviously my ego started to grow, but then [at the same time] my idea of myself went down. So I liked the person that other people thought that I was, but the real me I hated so much."
In a separate interview with Elle magazine, Cara explains why she went public with her struggle with depression. "I couldn't just sit there and listen to these girls, and boys, too, but usually girls, say this stuff, about bullying, about their sexuality, depression, and guilt and suicidal thoughts and just all of it, without being like, 'I have been through that, and it's going to be okay,' " she says. "If I can help a teenager go through a better time than they should be, then I am going to f**king do that. I mean, f**king being a teenager sucks. And I somehow came through the other end."
