This is not the first time Cara Delevingne has openly discussed her formative years battling depression, but it may be her most frank interview yet.
At 23 years old, the British covergirl has amassed a career in the modeling industry an elite few see in a lifetime. However, the glossy photos of her in magazines are hardly representative of how she sees herself or her job.
"The fashion industry," she told British Esquire exclusively, "is about surface, it's not about what's underneath, it's not about being yourself. You don't feel you matter as a person. You feel like it's just about your looks—and it is."
While the Suicide Squad star considers herself an actress more so than a self-described "weirdo" model, her early fame, albeit for physical reasons, has offered her a very public stage to discuss a battle afflicting many—depression.
Having first revealed her teenage history with depression in 2015, Delevingne personally aims to de-stigmatize conversations on the topic using her own honest narrative.
Her story begins with her mother, Pandora, who struggled with manic depression and addiction to heroin and prescription medication, the roots of frequent hospitalizations. While she had no in-depth knowledge of her mother's health problems growing up, Cara was affected by her absence. "I didn't feel like I had any control of anything in my life so I just kind of went on a food strike. I was like, 'I'm not going to eat until someone tells me where she is,'" Delevingne said of herself at 8 years old.
By the time she was a teenager, Cara had suffered her own mental breakdown. "I think I properly started dealing with depression when I was about 16," she told the magazine, "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."
As the depression escalated, she became suicidal. "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." The actress described how she would run off to the woods and bash her head into trees hoping to "knock myself out" and scratching "my legs till they bled."
At 16, she began taking medication, though she said the drugs had a numbing effect. "I missed out a lot from 16 to 18," she said. When Cara decided to stop taking them, "that week, I lost my virginity, I got into fights, I cried, I laughed. 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."
However, the young star does credit her medication with rescuing her. "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."
As for Pandora today, "She is [well] now. But it's a constant up and down. She'll never be cured, she'll never be fixed. It's about all of us learning to communicate about it and constantly support each other."
This issue of British Esquire is on sale Aug. 5.