Former first lady Michelle Obama, spoke openly in an interview published on Wednesday (March 10) about her low-grade struggles with depression as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent challenges faced during 2020.

In her interview, Obama encouraged Americans to speak more openly about their mental health stating that “depression is understandable…during these times” and “to think that somehow we can just continue to rise above all the shock and the trauma and the upheaval that we have been experiencing without feeling it in that way is just unrealistic”.

It is no secret that the economic fallout, loss of jobs, limitations to movement and closure of gyms, theatres and restaurants has had a serious impact on the mental health of people worldwide.

According to an August 2020 survey, conducted by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 41 per cent of respondents reported mental health issues stemming from the pandemic, with one in three Americans expressing that they had experienced symptoms of anxiety or depression.

This, Obama expressed, is “one of the reasons why we need to talk more about mental health because everybody deals with trauma, anxiety, the difficulties, in different ways”.

After revealing on her podcast last summer that she was suffering from “low grade depression” during the height of the pandemic, political strife and racial reckoning taking place in the US, Obama said she needed to acknowledge what she was going through “because a lot of times we feel like we have to cover that part of ourselves up, that we always have to rise above and look as if we’re not paddling hard underneath the water”.