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HOW SUPERHEROES ARE HELPING PEOPLE DEAL WITH MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES 

Many times when kids are growing up they look up to superheroes for comfort. It’s wonderful to think you could have a super power and be strong against so many things in life, and it’s a wonderful idea that can help kids, as well as adults, through their lives. And for one writer and lover of superheroes, they have helped her come to terms with her own anxiety and depression. 

 

As Courtney Enlow writes in SyFy Wire, “Nothing in the world can make you feel less like a superhero than mental illness. And that’s why it means the world that so many of the genre’s greatest heroes are open about their own struggles…To know that those who seem so big, so powerful, experience the same feelings as I do, as all of us struggle with mental illness do? It means everything.” 

 

Recently Ryan Reynolds came forward about suffering from anxiety on the eve of the release of Deadpool 2, and that his nerves got so out of hand, he went through a “real unhinged phase” in his twenties. Instead of seeking professional help, he was self-medicating. “I was partying and just trying to make myself vanish in some way…I’ve been to the darker end of the spectrum, which is not fun.”  

 

Chris Evans, aka Captain America, has also often talked in interviews about having a “noisy brain.” “Everyone’s brain is noisy,” he adds. “It makes thoughts. The problem is, in most of our lives, the root of suffering is following that brain noise and listening to that brain noise and actually identifying with it as if it’s who you are. That’s just the noise your brain makes, and more often than not, it probably doesn’t have much to say.”  

 

As Enlow concluded, “We may not be superheroes, but every single day we fight the villains that exist inside our brains. And usually, we win. If that’s not heroic, I don’t know what is.”  

 

Sonia
Article by Sonia

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