Sam Amico
You may remember Mara Wilson from the movie Matilda. The 1996 fantasy comedy directed by Danny DeVito and based on a classic novel from about a decade earlier.
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In it, Wilson plays a 6-year-old who develops psychokinetic abilities to deal with her fairly dishonorable family. Things weren’t much different in her real life — as she said she often felt different around others as a child as well.
Wilson, 35, explained during an appearance on Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcast.
“I was always very worried from a very young age. I worried about death, I worried about sickness, I was that kind of worrier,” she said, via Yahoo Entertainment. “And it was strange because I was either, like I said, a very sort of upbeat extroverted kid or I was having an anxiety attack
“When I was in third grade, that was really when all the s*** hit the fan. Third grade was when my mother was sick, I had just finished filming Matilda. I started having panic attacks about things like my pet hamster escaping.”
She added that she didn’t understand what anxiety was at the time.
“I think that my mother was probably afraid because she knew that mental illness ran in her family,” Wilson said. “And she was also just sort of like a just suck it up type of mom anyway. So she was just kind of like, ‘OK get over it, you’ll be fine, deal with it.’ And she had cancer, she was dealing with her own stuff at the time.”
Actress Mara Wilson On Navigating Mental Illness In The Public Eye
Along with panic attacks, Wilson said she suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder.
“I started washing my hands all the time, so much so that my hands were always red and chapped and raw and my mother would have to put salves and ointments and all these kinds of … all of her home remedies on them to make sure that they wouldn’t hurt so much anymore,” Wilson said. “It was a really hard time for me and I knew that it was weird.
“That was the thing. I knew that I was strange, I knew that this was something that other people didn’t have and I started having panic attacks at school. I had a feeling that this was not something that other kids had.”
So much so that she visited the school’s guidance counselor.
“I would go to the guidance counselor like every day but they didn’t really seem to know what to do with a child with anxiety, a child with obsessions and compulsions,” she said. “I think about it and the way that I talked about my symptoms and the way I described them, if I heard a child describe them today I would immediately be like, even if I didn’t have the extensive experience, I think if anybody heard the way that I was talking, they would immediately say that sounds like OCD.
“I think we know a little bit more about OCD now because it’s 25 years later but at the time, I guess people didn’t really have the knowledge that it could even happen to children.”
At about the age of 12, Wilson began regular psychotherapy, which helped her overcome her fear and OCD.
“I think I was on Zoloft at the time. I’m on Lexapro now and it helps because I could not function without it,” she said. “And I was diagnosed with severe OCD and I couldn’t have functioned without it. That diagnosis saved me.”
