'There's a problem with the poster girls for mental illness.'

This week, Selena Gomez delivered a moving acceptance speech at the American Music Awards.

Referring to her battle with mental illness, she said “I was absolutely broken inside…If you are broken you do not have to stay broken.”

In August of this year, Gomez said in a statement to People magazine that she was taking some time off as she was suffering from “anxiety, panic attacks and depression”.

Listen to Mia Freedman, Monique Bowley and Jessie Stephens talk about Selena’s speech on Mamamia Out Loud:

My problem, however, is that when we only have privileged, thin, successful, and highly functional people sharing their struggles, we end up with a very skewed idea of what mental illness looks like. And when these people (Miranda Kerr as an example) offer advice on how to get better, we sometimes end up with very simplified, and often inaccurate, ideas of what recovery looks like.

It's not that we shouldn't listen to these people, or value their bravery for speaking openly about their experiences. It's that we should be aware that often, the people with the platform and the profile to speak about anxiety or depression are the exception, and not the rule, when it comes to mental illness.

Because I can assure you, on the whole, anxiety doesn't look like Selena Gomez and Cara Delevigne. And it certainly doesn't look like either of these women on a red carpet or on screen.

It looks like men and women, of all different shapes, sizes and ethnicities, suffering in a variety of ways. It looks like people not going to school, not going to university, not being able to hold down a job, not being able to have typical social interactions and often, not being able to afford the help they need.

The reason I personally respond so strongly to the 'images' of high profile women speaking about their mental health struggles is because, without realising it, when I first enrolled in psychology I had a bizarrely glamourised idea of mental illness. Anxiety, depression, eating disorders - I was fascinated by them all (and still am).

But I also thought these problems all looked like a young, privileged, white person whose only barrier to getting better was their own mental state. I thought saying the right things, and challenging the right thoughts, was all one needed to do to rid the world of these common mental disorders.

But that's just not how it works.

The first time the reality hit me was when I worked in a clinic with girls and women suffering from eating disorders. In hindsight, I'm embarrassed by how naive I was. I thought we'd all sit around and tell secrets and they'd all open up about the deep issues that had caused their problems with food.

We speak to a mother and daughter about the possibility of anorexia being genetic. Post continues after video. 

Instead, I saw people of all different shapes and sizes. Eating disorders don't always look like a stick thin young woman - in fact, most of the time they don't. There were women with binge eating disorder and bulimia nervosa, and others who had a variety of symptoms that didn't fit in with any recognisable diagnosis. They were quiet. They were sad. They were lonely. They didn't look like supermodels in magazines. They looked unwell. Sometimes they were mean and rude. Not because that's who they were as people, but because they were sick.

One woman had been in and out of treatment for seven years. Another woman was in her late 40s, and had struggled with bulimia for most of her adult life.

While names like Princess Diana, Demi Lovato, Portia de Rossi and Lady Gaga are the ones we think of when we picture what an 'eating disorder' looks like, what we don't see are the women who don't get a voice. Because they're just regular people, who don't live in the public eye, and sometimes they never get better.

Last year, a 22-year-old Cara Delevingne spoke about the depression she suffered as a teenager. "All of a sudden I was hit with a massive wave of depression and anxiety and self-hatred," she said.

"The feelings were so painful that I would slam my head against a tree to try to knock myself out."

Her story was confronting, and without a doubt, important. Her words send the empowering message that you can get better, and that you're not alone.

But what we don't see, and what's missing from our conversations around mental health, is that these problems are bigger than the individual. Low socio-economic status is a profound predictor of psychiatric disorders. So is childhood trauma. So are maternal and paternal mental illness, which are obviously made more serious without access to health care.

So yes, Selena Gomez, Miranda Kerr, Kristen Bell, Demi Lovato, and Cara Delevingne do a huge service by sharing their struggles with depression, anxiety and eating disorders. But overwhelmingly, mental illness doesn't look like them. It's far, far less glamorous.

And while we're focusing on the individual, we're losing sight of the systematic ways our society locks people into lives plagued by mental disorders, and makes it really, really hard for them to recover.

You can listen to the full episode of Mamamia Out Loud, here.

Check out all our podcasts and any books mentioned in any of our shows at apple.co/mamamia.