Though Reinhart’s physical health, and her quest for answers surrounding it, has taken precedence in recent years, she’s long been dealing with mental health struggles too—she’s had depression and anxiety since she was a teen. She experienced her first panic attack in the eighth grade. “I just remember being in my school bathroom, sitting in the stall. I think what my body naturally was trying to do was just catch its breath,” she recalls. “I remember it feeling like a sudden sense of dread.”
School continued to be a common site for those episodes. “It was triggered, I think, by social anxiety, and by feeling very trapped at school,” she explains. “I spent many a year in school going to the bathroom often to sit in the stall and use the toilet paper as tissue, and breathe, try to breathe.”
Reinhart started pursuing an acting career in childhood—something her parents supported, driving her the eight hours from Ohio (where she grew up) to New York City for open casting calls. “I just felt like this young girl with a big dream that was nearly impossible,” Reinhart says. “I was surrounded by people who just didn’t get me. I also think people knew that I was an actor, and it made me feel like an outcast because there was, I think, a perception of, ‘Oh, she must think she’s better than us,’ because I’m trying to be an actor, which is this glitzy and glamorous thing in my small town.
“Once you got to know me, I was definitely bubbly and funny, but I was socially anxious and shy, and it was hard for me to make friends,” she continues. “So I kind of would just choose to isolate myself, and I think it made school really hard for me.”
Whenever Reinhart felt a panic attack coming on, she’d try her best to keep things from boiling over and would “look up at the sky” and try to “blink the tears away.” She’d also sometimes pinch the skin between her thumb and forefinger (a stress-relieving tactic she’d heard about at the time). “That shit doesn’t work. It didn’t work for me, at least.”
In seventh grade, Reinhart was so miserable that she begged her parents to let her stay home from school (or even be homeschooled); at that point, she says, “they couldn’t ignore” that she was having mental health problems. They took Reinhart to see a therapist and a psychiatrist, who put her on an antidepressant.
Despite how dogged Reinhart was about chasing her dreams, her mental health struggles occasionally threatened to thwart that pursuit. “When I would tape auditions, the note would be like, ‘Can you have more energy?’” she says. “I’m, like, 16, I should have energy, and I didn’t. I think it was definitely due to the depression. But it was also, looking back, due to the medication.” (Fatigue can be a side effect of both depression and the drugs that treat it.)
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