Photo credit: Andrea Raffin / Shutterstock.com

Bella Hadid may be one of the highest-paid and most in-demand models in the world, but behind the scenes, she still appears to be suffering from her mental health.

The 25-year-old Victoria’s Secret model opened up to The Wall Street Journal about her “excruciating” ongoing mental health battle, and what she said about struggling to leave the house because of the constant paparazzi attention and hurtful comments from social media trolls was particularly heartbreaking to read.

Bella told the WSJ that she is “in such a weird place mentally” and it’s actually very difficult for her “to get out of the house and put an outfit together, especially with the anxiety of photographers being outside and all of that.”

However, she said that she is learning to accept the paparazzi and the internet trolls who always have something negative to say, and is trying not to let it get to her so long as she is happy with her own choices…

“In the last year, it was really important for me to learn that even if people talk about my style or if they like it or if they don’t, it doesn’t matter, because it’s my style,” she said.

“When I leave the house in the morning, what I think about is: Does this make me happy? Do I feel good in this and do I feel comfortable?”

Bella also told the WSJ why she posted those hard-to-look-at selfies of herself crying on Instagram back in November last year…

“I would have really depressive episodes and my mom or my doctor would ask how I was and instead of having to respond in text, I would just send them a photo,” she confessed.

“It was the easiest thing for me to do at the time because I was never able to explain how I was feeling.

“I would just be in excruciating and debilitating mental and physical pain, and I didn’t know why. That was over the past three years.”

She concluded by saying that she posted the candid images because she wanted “to make sure that anybody that was feeling that way knew it was OK to feel that way,” because knowing there were other people in similar situations has always helped her.

“Walking outside, being able to remember there are so many people going through things and have similar patterns to me, it makes me feel better,” she said.

“I don’t know if that’s not what people want on Instagram, and that’s fine. I don’t have to be on Instagram forever. I feel like real is the new real, and that’s what’s important to me.”

This isn’t the first time Yolanda Hadid’s daughter has opened up about her mental health. Last year, she took to social media to confess that she had “suffered from extreme depression and anxiety” for most of her teenage and adult life, and her long work days weren’t making it any better…

“My social anxiety was something that slowly crept up on me as I grew into my twenties,” she wrote on Instagram at the time.

“It got harder for me to go out without having one drink to calm my nerves, which made me not want to go out at all, so I was just hibernating between jobs.

“With a life that is constantly pushing a social regime, along with working 13 hour days, every single day, I knew this wasn’t a sustainable life for me.”

We’re glad that Bella has been so candid with her fans about her ongoing struggles, and we know that she has already helped so many people going through the same thing!