Selena Gomez launches new mental health awareness campaign

May kicks off Mental Health Awareness Month. Selena Gomez has established herself already as a mental health awareness advocate. In late 2021, Gomez announced that she was launching the mental health platform Wondermind, which features mental health resources. Wondermind launched in 2022. For 2021’s Mental Health Awareness month, Gomez launched the Mental Health 101 campaign,  “dedicated to supporting mental health education and encouraging financial support for more mental health services in educational services”. Now, Gomez is taking another step to advocate for mental health awareness by launching a new campaign called ‘Your Words Matter’.

The initiative is a collaboration between Gomez’s cosmetics company Rare Beauty and Mental Health First Aid, which describes itself  on its site as, “a skills-based training course that teaches participants about mental health and substance-use issues.” That makes it the perfect partner for Gomez in this venture. On social media, she described ‘Your Words Matter’s aim to, “educate on the power of your words when talking about mental health.”

Gomez continued, “Words can be a barrier to people seeking help and increase the stigma associated with mental health. Many of these words have been normalized and accepted for far too long, but it’s time we bring awareness to the words we use… because they matter.”

Some recommended changes that the ‘Your Words Matter’ campaign highlighted include changing the language around suicide, homelessness, drug addiction, and bipolar disorder:

Saying, ‘A person who uses drugs,’ rather than a drug addict, or ‘person with bipolar disorder instead of bipolar person, the campaign urges, is more compassionate. By changing this language, people with mental health struggles will hopefully feel less stigmatized. This stigma is not only a factor in their dealings with society but is internalized and impacts how they feel about themselves and the possibility of seeking help. The campaign hopes to build bridges of understanding around mental health and addiction and to make seeking help for these struggles seem less daunting by creating compassionate discourse about them.

Gomez has been open about her own mental health struggles in the past: she talked about her own bipolar disorder on Instagram Live in 2020, and in 2019 talked about living with anxiety and depression in her acceptance speech for the McLean Award for her work in mental health advocacy.