‘Jane the Virgin’ Star Gets Candid About Her Struggle With Depression
Jane the Virgin star Gina Rodriguez is sharing her struggle with depression, revealing in a new interview that she needed to stop filming for a while to get her mental health to a better place.
In a sit down with NBC’s Kate Snow, Rodriguez revealed that she has been battling depression since she was a teenager.
“I think I started dealing with depression around sixteen,” the actress, 34, said “I started dealing with the idea of…everything is going to be better when I’m gone. Life will be easier. All the woes will be away, all the problems. Then I wouldn’t have to fail or succeed, right? Then all this surmounting pressure would go away.”
Things only became more difficult for the star over the years. And while filming the last season of Jane the Virgin, her panic attacks became debilitating.
“There was a point where I couldn’t, I couldn’t push through every single time anymore,” she shared. “And I’m one of those human beings, and I know either you’re it or you know who they are, where I’m just like, ‘I’ll handle it later. I’ll deal with it later. I’ll figure it out later. I just have to do this now.’ All the while dealing with this, you know, your silent little dragon in your head.”
“This season was the first season where I had to stop production,” continued Rodriguez. “I had a really tumultuous season and I was unafraid for the first time to be like, ‘I can’t.'”
Rodriguez said anxiety and depression are symptoms often connected to Hashimoto’s disease, which she suffers from. Moreover, she does not want mental health struggles to carry a stigma for young women.
“It has to be a part of the conversations I have with these young girls,” she said. “I can’t just tell them to go out and make their dreams come true and then to ignore everything else.”
