Ever feel like your Instagram feed is filled with nothing but unrealistic lifestyles and toxic positivity? Me too.
But with a couple of ‘unfollows’ and a search into lifelike accounts that uplift and empower me, I was able to turn my daily scroll around. Because if I’m going to spend time each day scrolling, I want it to be worthwhile.
Something as simple as curating your own Instagram feed might be just the tool you need to help ease your anxiety, shift your perspective, or better understand the many complexities of mental health.
While dialogues around mental health are slowly starting to open up in life and on social media, the fight for mental health awareness still continues.
Thankfully, these brave women are the mental health advocates everyone needs to follow on Instagram. They’re breaking the stigma around mental health conditions, promoting self-love, and reassuring everyone that we all cope with hardships differently and these complex conditions can present in so many unique ways.
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Rupi Kaur
If you know Rupi Kaur for her beautiful collection of poetry, you’ll know that she deep dives into her own experience with mental illness and trauma throughout her three books. But she also shares snippets of her poems on social media too!
Even after self-publishing her first two collections of poetry Milk and Honey and The Sun and Her Flowers, which were extremely well received, she continued struggling with anxiety and also experienced imposter syndrome. She is proof that even those who on the surface ‘appear to have it all’ may still be dealing with their own issues on the inside.
If you’re inspired by what she shares on Instagram, we recommend reading her latest poetry collection Home Body, which she describes as a “love letter to myself”.
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Esme Weijun Wang
Esme Weijun Wang’s whimsical personality and honest feed is a refreshing sight on social media.
She is a Taiwanese-American writer who shares her journey living with schizoaffective disorder and Lyme disease on her Instagram, as well as in her New York Times bestselling essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias.
She doesn’t sugarcoat her mental health condition and is a beacon of hope for others as an image of resilience. In fact, she embraces her mental health journey as she believes these conditions shouldn’t be glamourised because doing so “inhibits creativity”.
Her quirkiness and one-of-a-kind posts are sure to add a lot of colour and intrigue to your social feed.
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Joanna Konstantopoulou
Joanna Konstantopoulou is an award-winning London psychologist who specialises in the intersection of physical and mental health. Her social feed offers super accessible tips and tricks to practise self-care and self-love when living with a chronic illness.
She believes these simple acts of taking care of your mind and body, will help ensure your low feelings are not prolonged, which can then lead to more serious mental health problems down the track as well as physical sickness.
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Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga is a woman who needs no introduction but if you’re not yet following her on Instagram, she’s a powerful and influential advocate for mental health on this platform too. As the founder of Born This Way Foundation, Lady Gaga is extremely passionate about bringing awareness to the mental health crisis and empowering young people to create a kinder, braver, and more empathic world.
Her feed is the perfect representation of how she lives her life in her own unique way and is not ashamed to hide away her true self, both the highlights and the low-lights.
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Alexandra Elle
Alexandra Elle uses her social media platform to advocate for self-care and acceptance. Whoever comes to her profile doesn’t just get told what to do but instead joins a supportive community which she cultivates through her empowering and informative posts.
Alex is known for writing simple affirmations on post-it notes which she shares throughout her feed.
If you love her Instagram posts, we recommend checking out her memoir After the Rain, where she delivers 15 lessons on how to overcome obstacles, build confidence, and cultivate abundance.
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Elyse Fox
As the founder of Sad Girls Club, a mental health organisation for millennials and Gen Z, Elyse Fox tackles the hard questions from racial injustice to her own mental health journey. Both her personal account and Sad Girls Club are home to uplifting quotes and services that are helping break the stigma around mental illness.
This strong online presence was triggered after she released a documentary about her life with depression and received an influx of young women seeking a mentor to help them through their own struggles.
Her accounts are a safe space where young women can connect with others and understand that they’re not alone.
Follow Elyse on Instagram. Follow Sad Girls Club on Instagram.
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Minna Lee
Minna Lee is the kind of positivity and brightness everyone needs in their life. Her fun and accessible posts, stories, and reels are bringing awareness to the things that appear simple but never are, like setting boundaries, moving through uncomfortable feelings, and accepting what you can and can’t control in life.
She also touches on her own mental health journey (like when she used to bail on therapy or her experience with an eating disorder) and the things she’s learned along the way.
When you’re in need of some lighter content, her posts of her Corgi, Benny are the perfect mood booster.
This article was originally published on A Girl In Progress.
