Think Piece
The Guardian’s Profile of Claire Foye

  • October, 2018

It’s great that celebrities like Claire Foy are being open about psychological problems but please, no more headlines about demons and Drama Queens

A profile of actor Claire Foy in The Guardian magazine on Saturday told of her difficulties with anxiety. These are presented as surprising given how successful she is. Accompanying photographs present the actor as calm and serene: they are posed and very still, showing her wide-eyed, innocent-looking and extremely pretty. In one she looks positively regal and could well be in character for her part of Queen Elizabeth in The Crown. Meanwhile she talks to the journalist, Tom Lamont, of a powerful sense of internal struggle and constant thoughts of ‘how shit’ she is. She is pleased to be going to see a therapist at last. She links her anxiety to the development in her teenage years of a mask of inauthenticity, a response to the pressure she felt to fit in and be as helpful as possible in the face of chaos in her family life.

The title of the piece is Drama Queen, a play on the part she is most well known for. In this particular context this is a bad joke. Journalists should be careful to avoid harmful stereotypes, such as that of ‘the hysterical or over-emotional woman’, most especially in a piece about a woman who experiences very real and acute anxiety. And the subtitle, which refers to Foy ‘battling lifelong demons’, is also unfortunate and should have come out. Characterizing anxiety as demonic and persistent is not going to help readers feel that anxiety is something they can understand and learn to manage better.

The piece hinges on the idea that it is somehow remarkable that even the successful and famous have psychological difficulties. It is good that the actor is bravely speaking out and being open about her problems. More of this, please. But it would be so helpful if journalists could describe such difficulties as a more normal part of life, as experiences which touch most of us, directly or indirectly, at some point in our lives. Indeed perhaps ambitious people like Foy, who routinely put themselves in the public eye in demanding roles, are especially prone to anxieties of the kind she talks about. It is hard to understand why those who achieve so remarkably under the spotlight would choose to push themselves in the way they do without having a need, and a desire of course, to prove something – to themselves or to others around them. Anxiety about one’s worth could be seen as an inevitable part of life for many performers – in the arts and in public life more generally. The idea that our strengths are often intimately bound up with our weaknesses is a very useful one to get across, loosening the binary opposition between success and weakness, and the damaging association of mental health problems with vulnerability and failure.

Arabella Kurtz, Consultant Clinical Psychologist & Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Infrastructure Lead, Association of Clinical Psychologists UK