how madeline ford is revolutionizing the conversation around mental health
At first sight, she’s enchanting. The type of girl you read about in fairytales and see swirled into whimsical poems about fairies & princesses. Her storybook beauty is what entrances her audiences at first glance, but what is most powerful is the incomparable values, heart and relatability that lie within her — and how she uses every opportunity to showcase it, organically and with true merit.
Her content is reminiscent of a FaceTime call with your very best friend, whom you check in with from time to time with no awareness of the time between meetings as their authenticity and excitement to connect color every conversation in bright technicolor. Her most notable showcases of raw honesty are her journey of sharing her sexuality with her following and her well-documented experience with her mental health, along with the trials & tribulations that come with medication, depression and diagnoses.
While influencers have certainly become more comfortable sharing their struggles with mental health, the closing gap between audiences & creators due to rapidly advancing technology has caused some of them to create more distance and boundaries than ever before to preserve their privacy. Along with this, oftentimes influencers can receive relentless backlash and scrutiny when revealing any mental health disorders or struggles, with audiences questioning the validity and handling of their conditions. When you’re already suffering at the hands of your mind and body chemistry, it can become almost unbearable to also carry the burden of strangers’ opinions on how you’re choosing to cope. Creators may also fear getting pigeon-holed when they choose to advocate for certain causes, but Madeline has successfully avoided this theory by solidifying herself as a successful, adored creator with a medley of hobbies, interests and opinions of which her mental health is simply a part of but not her only defining characteristic.
In my opinion, her relatability is largely to thank for her dedicated following, because her content transcends that of typical creators by building trust and friendship between her & her audience. Audiences, especially young ones, are incredibly perceptive and aware of what is sincere content vs. fabricated media for the sake of appearing differently on camera. This is an odd line to walk, because a part of being an influencer is possessing something otherworldly & inspirational audiences want to duplicate and observe. However, you also have to maintain a sense of relatability to foster a relationship that keeps your followers engaged and loyal to your brand without being able to have a two-sided conversation.
Another key part of her online presence is sharing how insecurities plague even the most beautiful & envied girls of social media. The embedded TikTok to the right is an example of this, where she confesses that she sometimes considers getting plastic surgery to rectify her insecurities and those moments are often triggered by the overconsumption of social media. This is a crystal clear phenomenon, validated by Boston University’s School of Medicine, with one study confirming everyone’s suspicions that “time spent on social media and the use of photo-editing applications correlates with a person’s desire to undergo cosmetic procedures,” but to hear it come from someone who some would assume might be the exception to this epidemic is exemplary of social media’s dangers never discriminate.
I’ve been following Madeline for a little over a year, and she has definitely become a comfort creator whose page I find myself on anytime I’m questioning myself and need the presence of another girl who just gets it. “Welcome to a day in my life living at my parents house because I need to be supervised so I don’t k*ll myself” is one of her opening lines for just one of her multitude of raw videos documenting the ups & downs of depression & bipolar 2, which she has opened up about having, without any sugarcoating. While posting something so transparent and vulnerable must’ve been intimidating, the amount of girls suffering from depression at home watching that who felt validated and seen by that video? It must’ve been an innumerable amount, a group I’m apart of. She played a monumental role in accepting my depression and feeling more comfortable discussing it. Anxiety, though also stigmatized, is more romanticized and therefore accepted than depression. Depression can be dirty hair, bed rotting, bed rotting, double digit screen time, doom scrolling, inexplicable tears, and that’s exactly what Madeline showcases — without any frills or inhibitions. It takes a lot of grit & courage to share a glimpse into that side of your life, which solidifies the fact that this is certainly her calling — to serve as a place of solace & comfort and as a north star that guides & inspires young viewers while reflecting back their own image like a comforting looking glass.
