Goldie Hawn has been a star for decades and first gained fame in her early 20s. But during those early years when her star was rising, Hawn felt particularly low, she revealed in a new interview.
“When I was young, I became depressed. I was 21, and I was rising to success,” Hawn explained in an interview this week with Good Morning Britain. She found that early fame to be “a very difficult thing [and] I didn’t necessarily want that,” she said.
Hawn said that she “didn’t want to be a big deal, I wanted to go home…I didn’t have delusions of grandeur on any level, I was extremely realistic.” But the problem was that she was a dancer and had a plan for her life, “and then things changed,” she said.
“I was very depressed and I had a lot of these issues where I couldn’t even go outside in public,” she said. But Hawn also explained that she found ways to cope. “This is something that, for me, I worked through. I went to a doctor, I went to a psychologist, I learned about quieting my mind and what happens to the brain,” she said.
From there, Hawn said she wanted to share what she’d learned, which has become the focus of the children’s mental health organization she founded, MindUp. Making sure everyone has the tools to care for their mental health is crucial, Hawn said, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic when kids are spending more time at home without their usual social circles and their parents are stressed out too.
“When this pandemic happened, it gobsmacked everyone,” Hawn said. “We didn’t know how to handle our children, we were dealing with ourselves…. It’s just a plethora of problems.”
That’s why Hawn said she wants people to feel comfortable talking about their mental health, doing what they need to do to feel okay, and asking for help when they need it. “For every one of us, we may have a different reason why we may feel low, or anxious, or depressed,” she said. “All I want to say is that if you really aren’t happy, we do need to be able to tend to ourselves, to go to a doctor. Don’t be embarrassed.”
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