Camila Mendes on Brave Self-Love,’Riverdale’ and More, on New Jay Shetty Podcast
Camila Mendes is speaking with striking honesty about her mental health, opening up about the eating disorder and panic attacks she navigated during her early years on ‘Riverdale,’ and doing it in a way that quietly gives other people permission to be gentler with themselves. Appearing on the On Purpose podcast with Jay Shetty, the actress, 32, traced those struggles back to a perfectionism that never quite let her clock out. “My perfectionism came up a lot,” she shared. “I needed to be on all the time and at my best and looking my best.”
What Camila Mendes Shared About Her Mental Health
Mendes explained that she had been managing an eating disorder since her high-school years, and that the relentless pace of a network production made those feelings harder to carry. She described the disorienting loss of control that came from inhabiting a character whose whole image was so different from her own, and how, on the days she already felt fragile, being the constant center of the camera’s attention could tip into panic. She was careful, though, not to reduce those years to only their hardest moments, and that nuance is part of what makes her candor land so gently rather than heavily.
How Camila Mendes Learned to Sit With Her Emotions
The most quietly profound stretch of the conversation was her theory of her own panic, which tended to arrive, she realized, precisely when she felt she was not allowed to feel what she was feeling. If she needed to cry and believed she could not, that was the trigger. Given the space to simply let it move through her, she said, she could come out the other side, because “sometimes that’s all it is. You just need to release the energy.” It is a strikingly healthy reframe, the kind that treats emotion as something to be honored on its own timeline rather than outrun.
Why Camila Mendes’s Story Matters Now
Mendes has never pretended to have it all figured out, and she has spoken before, in her mental health journey, about learning to put her own care first. What she offers now is not a tidy before-and-after but something more useful, which is proof that a person can hold gratitude and difficulty in the very same hand. She still looks back on her time as Veronica “very fondly,” even as she names how genuinely hard parts of it were, and that refusal to flatten her own experience into a single note is its own kind of grace. At Glitter, self-love has always meant the full picture, the confidence and the healing both, and Mendes has just offered a line worth keeping close: letting yourself feel is not weakness, it is how you get free.
If you or someone you know is struggling with an eating disorder, the Alliance for Eating Disorders provides a free, fully-staffed helpline at 1-866-662-1235, as well as free, therapist-led support groups.
