Amanda Seyfried has opened up about her current experience with obsessive-compulsive disorder decades after first receiving her diagnosis.
Seyfried, 40, said she was diagnosed with “really extreme” OCD when she was 19 years old. In an interview with Vogue, published Thursday, the Mamma Mia! star reflected on navigating her diagnosis as a young actor and how she’s managing today.
OCD is an anxiety disorder in which the person can experience frequent obsessive, intrusive thoughts and then exhibit compulsive behaviors in an attempt to neutralize or rid themselves of the thoughts, according to the International OCD Foundation.
“I was living in Marina del Rey at the time, shooting Big Love, and my mom had to take a sabbatical from work in Pennsylvania to live with me for a month,” she said, reflecting on one of her early experiences with OCD. “I got my brain scans, and that’s when I got on medication — which to this day, I’m on every night.”
As a younger actor, she explained how she distanced herself from any of her triggers, like “drinking too much alcohol, doing any drugs at all, or staying out too late.”
“I would make plans and then just not go,” she said. “I guess I did make choices. I didn’t enter that realm of nightclubs. I gotta give credit to my OCD.”
The Mean Girls actor previously revealed in a 2016 interview with Allure that she takes Lexapro for her OCD, saying at the time that she had no plans to stop taking the medication.
“I’ve been on it since I was 19, so 11 years. I’m on the lowest dose. I don’t see the point of getting off of it,” she told Allure. “Whether it’s placebo or not, I don’t want to risk it. And what are you fighting against? Just the stigma of using a tool?”
She continued: “A mental illness is a thing that people cast in a different category [from other illnesses], but I don’t think it is. It should be taken as seriously as anything else. You don’t see the mental illness: It’s not a mass; it’s not a cyst. But it’s there. Why do you need to prove it? If you can treat it, you treat it.”
Seyfried explained that her OCD has a number of symptoms, including the most common (thoughts and compulsions), to an irrational fear of people using ovens, and worries over her own physical health.
“I had pretty bad health anxiety that came from the OCD and thought I had a tumor in my brain. I had an MRI and the neurologist referred me to a psychiatrist,” she said. “As I get older, the compulsive thoughts and fears have diminished a lot. Knowing that a lot of my fears are not reality-based really helps.”
