Kaia Gerber, Paloma Elsesser, Adut Akech, and More Models Get Real About Mental Health

I don't have a brain, what do you mean,

I'm a model. I don't

That's so crazy, mental health, what is that?

[light music]

Recently I recapped how my 2019 was.

You know, career-wise, amazing.

Personally, for me, a human being, not a model,

it was not a great year.

It actually interesting that like fashion

and being around a lot of people who you would think

would think that they're perfect or feel perfect

or look perfect or have perfect lives,

who are deeply unhappy with how they look and their lives.

As a model, you have to literally have this separation

of yourself where you don't even belong to you anymore,

what it does to your brain is so fucked up,

all the models that I know,

we all have self-esteem problems.

So it's really funny when you see people targeting us

or making fun or thinking that we're this like

super sexy entity, imagine the whole world judging

every pore of your entire body,

who trained you how to cope with that?

There's a lot of pressure to be

not perfect but yeah to be on for people because

you know, for me personally I never wanna seem like

I'm not grateful for opportunities or come off as a diva

and you know, sometimes I feel like you have to like

try extra hard to be like the happy positive model on set.

Mental health is really important, I'm only 18

and I'm just going to start working on it.

I want to see myself a few years later

and see how I'm dealing with life.

I suffer from very bad depression and anxiety.

I've been suffering with it for some time

and I decided like enough is enough,

I'm not gonna keep suffering from this in silence,

I know that there's so many people out there who are going

through the same thing as I'm going through.

What you see in the media

most times is the highlight reel.

It's okay not to be okay sometimes,

it's okay to be sad,

it's okay to have bad days, those aren't the days

that we're putting on Instagram.

What's hard is that people still despite like

all of this affirmed tragedy and history that people

still equate success with happiness or confidence

or wholeness and I sometimes don't wanna let people down

in that that's not what it's like.

But that's also not not true in ways,

I do feel so much more full in that I've been able to like

change how people see and feel about themselves

which is so much more fulfilling than I could've imagined.

But sometimes it feels like I get home and I have to like

unzip myself [laughs] hang myself up for the night.

Some girls join this industry at like an age of 16,

they leave school at this hope of becoming like a model,

a lot of the time it's money

and you know they wanna support themselves

and the people around them and sometimes

like all their work may dry up,

there's always that hope of something new coming through.

But at the end of the day,

they just wanna keep a flow.

Imagine like being in a workplace where everybodys

always saying like oh my God you look so good

and you're so pretty and whatever, blah blah blah,

your vision of life changes maybe a little bit

so I guess people just get addicted to it

and then they don't wanna leave anymore

so they just rather wanna struggle and stay than leave.

I think there needs to be a major overhaul

in how girls and people are treated,

not just as objects, but as disposable.

Existing in scarcity is such a dangerous

and violent war zone in any space

and fortunately, you know, this version of scarcity

in which I live in is still very lucky

but it still takes a toll on me

and takes a toll on a lot, a lot of people in this industry

and it's not just models, it's why the competition

and the abuse of power is so pervasive is because

everyone's afraid to get kicked out and to be over

and it's really dangerous.

I feel like a lot of the models they don't speak up

because they know that they're risking something.

'Cause it's dangled in your face that you're replacable.

It's litearlly dangled in your face,

you don't like how you're doing things?

Cool, we can replace you. Yeah.

This is why people don't speak up

because the fear. They feel disposable.

Yeah, the fear is so strong.

Sometimes I think like oh, I could use a two month

holiday and then I'm like oh but what if after

those two months no one wants to book be anymore?

Fashion is so fast, you never know like

what the next trend is

and if you're still gonna be in trend.

There is a lot of turnover,

you know you see models come and you see models go,

I think you know there has to be a discussion

with casting directors and a discussion with editors of

what they want to see and what

makes them want a model to last.

I think that a lot of models are fearful because

we're often made to feel like if we speak out about

something against a certain client or a brand or designer,

that we're gonna mess up the relationship and therefore

will never be used again.

If something isn't right, we should be able to voice it

without feeling like we're gonna be crucified for it.

What's the lifetime of a model, how long?

Everyone says you have five years max.

Eh, no.

But let's just say--

Yeah, everyone says you have five years

but if you're smart and you know what you're doing,

you can make it last longer.

But think about it, if you did it for five years

and it's all these issues would you wanna be like,

oh I'm just gonna speak up,

or I'm just gonna get my bag and dip.

Yeah. Do you know what I mean?

And I feel like a lot of the reason why it lasts

five years is because of the way this industry

They did it. Ruins you mentally.

Yeah. It's not because

you become ugly or you look

No. Or you can't walk anymore.

Most models, they quit. Yeah.

They just leave, they just walk away.

No one says you can't model anymore.

They leave broke, they leave, they leave tainted,

they leave like empty shells of what they once were.

They literally have no more life in them.

There are so many moving parts

especially being part of an industry with so many different

people that you face a lot of struggles.

You have to wake up every day and choose that happiness

for yourself, not for someone else,

and not based on anyone else.

I didn't come from any kind of money,

I have dedicated my entire 20s to an industry

in which tells me that in a few years it's gonna be over.

So, it's pretty scary.

And it wears on my mental health,

it has worn on my relationships.

I spent 40% of my life on an airplane.

You know, so yeah, it's definitely changed

but it's also impacted it in other ways

in which like I can always say that no matter what

I changed something and I never envisioned,

you know, I couldn't tell my like chubby 10 year old self

who thought she wasn't gonna do anything in the world.

So, grateful for that.

[light music]