Trending:
- Dove Cameron opened up about her intense rise to fame on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast
- The actress gained fame as the title characters in Disney Channel’s Liv and Maddie
- Cameron said she “didn’t really learn how to navigate fan attention or public attention for many years”
Dove Cameron is getting candid about her mental health.
The actress and singer, 29, opened up about her intense rise to fame and how it impacted her well-being on a recent episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast.
When Shepard, 50, asked about the “overnight fandom” she experienced as a young actress on Disney Channel’s Liv and Maddie, she said, “I couldn’t have prepared.”
Cameron, who played both titular characters in the comedy series from 2013 to 2017, continued, “I also think I surprised myself by being more introverted than I anticipated. You truly don’t know until you’re put into that situation. And then you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m very introverted.’ ”
“I didn’t really learn how to navigate fan attention or public attention for many years. I used to have full panic attacks,” she added.
“There was so much going on in my personal life,” Cameron, whose father died by suicide just before she began working on the series, said. “That’s going to affect any kid. When you’re 15 and that happens, it changes the course of your life.”
As for the show, she noted, “And within the same calendar year, we were in 900 million homes and translated into all these different languages.”
Cameron said she struggled to understand her father’s death during those years. “There was no way for me to wrap my head around it. Understand it, conceptualize it. We were at his funeral, and then like, on Bainbridge Island. And then a couple months later, I was at The Grove with people asking me to sign glossies. I didn’t know how to really reconcile with that.”
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She continued, “It was almost like [at] the beginning of my career, I was so shrouded by this heavy cloud that it didn’t hit me that I was a famous person until years later.”
The “Too Much” singer said that she felt safe on the Disney set. “I would come to work every day and some days would be good and some days would be bad, and everybody was super protective of me. And it was kind of like a volatile time in my life in general, just being a teenager, being on TV,” she said, adding that the show “was a great escape.”
The Descendants alum recently told PEOPLE in an exclusive interview that she went on a journey of self-reflection to get to where she is now.
“I think I was under the impression that because I have always been someone who was very in touch with what was going on with me, that it almost acted as a hindrance as I got older, I had convinced myself that I knew how to manage my mental health well,” she told PEOPLE in March. “I tricked myself into thinking that I never needed to stop and take breaks. It was like, ‘I know what this is. I know how to deal with myself. I know how to help myself so I can continue doing whatever I want to do professionally at the rate that I want to do it, and I never need to stop.’ ”
Cameron continued, “When I finally did get the cue from my body and my brain, it was like there’s no other way around this other than to stop and sort of take action around what’s going on inside my brain and my body.”
The singer added, “So while, yes, I felt a little self-conscious taking time for my mental health when nobody really knew what was going on with me, it’s the best thing that I’ve done for myself, and it will continue to be the only reason why I am so good and relatively functional now because I took that time.”
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org.
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