We’ve talked a lot on this blog about the heroin epidemic in Ohio, and in particular about how it’s affected groups of people who transcend the traditional idea of what heroin users look like. In a recent interview with Esquire, actress/model Cara Delevingne shared that her struggle with depression dates back to her childhood and the effects her mother’s heroin use had on her. Her mother, a wealthy member of the aristocracy, likely isn’t what you’d imagine when thinking of a heroin addict, but that’s part of the importance of bringing this issue into the light. We wanted to share the excerpt from the Esquire piece below, both to share how one young rising star’s public acknowledgement of her depression might help others acknowledge their own depression and seek treatment for it, and to shine a light on how heroin use transcends class and income levels and can affect the people in a heroin user’s life. If you’re in northeastern Ohio and would like to talk about treatment options for depression or heroin use, we hope you’ll contact us.
Pandora (Cara’s mother) is herself no stranger to the social pages of Tatler. But hers has not been an easy existence. A manic depressive, she has struggled for much of her adult life with chronic addictions to heroin and prescription drugs, which frequently meant she could not be at home with her children. “Sometimes they have had to live with me being too ill to mother them, which has been agony for me,” she has said.
Cara and Pandora have always been exceptionally close. The occasions during her childhood when her mother was away she found extremely difficult. “She was sick a lot, in hospital a lot,” Cara says, “and there were times when she would leave for quite a long time and I wouldn’t know where she was.”
When Cara was about eight years old she stopped eating. “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.'”
Cara didn’t discover until much later exactly what was wrong with her mother. “I remember my sister, Poppy, saying something like, ‘Mum used to do heroin.’ And I was like, ‘What the f*** is that? Like heroes and heroines?’ I was a tiny child. Like, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.'”
It wasn’t until she was in her teens that it all started to make sense. And then Cara’s world seems to have fallen apart. “I think I properly started dealing with depression when I was about 16,” she says, “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 — I had a mental breakdown.”