Sarah Gilman Never Thought She’d Be in Recovery
"I really credit [my therapist] with helping me survive that time."
The following article discusses topics such as eating disorders, self-harm, and suicide. If you or someone you know is in a mental health crisis, please call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline anytime at 988. You can access non-emergency emotional support through the NAMI Helpline (1-800-950-6264) Monday through Friday, 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. ET, plus 24/7 referral services through SAMHSA’s National Helpline (1-800-662-4357).
There’s a lot to talk about with Sarah Gilman. The actress (Penny in CSI: Vegas, Delia in Disney Channel’s I Didn’t Do It, etc.) admits she’s often afraid to relive emotions from challenging times. I assure her that she has the reins. We can get deep right away, or she can pick what she feels most comfortable sharing. (I’m a human being before I’m a journalist, and her story is hers to tell.) She goes for it.
Here are some facts you need to know: Gilman started having OCD symptoms in middle school. Around that time, she also began self-harming. After her stint on Disney Channel, she developed—and eventually went to treatment for—an eating disorder. (Gilman identified this as another form of self-harm, in her experience.) Everything kind of came to a head junior year of college when, struggling with depression, she had a suicide attempt. We will touch on all of that.
Gilman and her parents chose to seek professional help when the OCD symptoms negatively impacted their lives. “We were so out of our depth because OCD can be such an odd and irrational-from-the-outside situation,” she said. “I felt that it was happening to me. It was out of my control, and I was caught in it.”
There are many flavors (if you will) of OCD, and hers manifested as accumulating items to prevent harm. “My fears were that my parents would be killed, that my family was going to die,” Gilman explained. “And the way to assuage those fears, my compulsion, [was] keeping things.”
Gilman continued, “It led to picking up used batteries in the street in downtown LA. It was a big problem on vacation or at grocery stores because I would brush up against something, and if my parents didn’t buy it, [I’d] just have an absolute meltdown.” Cognitive behavioral therapy and medication ultimately helped manage her symptoms over the years.
Back then, Gilman and her parents learned about the disorder together, and she remembers them joining sessions with her psychiatrist / OCD specialist. “I’m very lucky. In my family, there was no stigma or shame around therapy,” she noted.
Gilman didn’t feel ashamed of her OCD, but self-harm was another story. “I knew I wasn’t supposed to be doing it,” she recalled. Over time, it felt like “an ingrained response” she couldn’t shake. “It was a mixture of wanting help and not knowing how to ask for it—not knowing how to verbally communicate—punishing myself when I perceived I wasn’t good enough or I had done something wrong, and numbing really big emotions,” she said. “I didn’t know how to externalize emotions in a healthy way.”
Gilman’s self-harm recovery, therefore, centered around pinpointing different coping skills. She had to learn, in and outside of therapy, to access better outlets. For her, that was exercise or shocking her system with cold water.
Recovery also became about “finding ways to make it harder to do the thing you don’t want to do and easier to do the replacement,” Gilman said. She discovered this overall concept of rerouting behaviors in residential eating disorder treatment (a program she was referred to by a therapist in college). One simple yet impactful hack is “leaving a Post-it [message] where I might go get something to hurt myself,” Gilman explained.
The school year after Gilman’s eating disorder treatment, she had a suicide attempt. “[Suicidal ideation] existed as a passive thing for a while until college, when I had my attempt,” she noted. With the mental health issues she’d experienced up to that point, along with isolation from friends, it was a “perfect storm of risk factors,” she said.
Gilman intended to temporarily withdraw from school and go to a residential program for depression. However, the plan changed when she booked a film, Daphne & Velma (she was Velma).
To be clear, she doesn’t advocate for putting off treatment—quite the opposite, actually. But at the time, Gilman’s dad came to the movie set and she embraced the work she enjoyed. “When you’re doing something you love, it’s also easier to be like, ‘I’m happy to be here.’ And I do think that after my attempt—and you [may] hear this with people [who] survive attempts—I was filled with this really passionate affirmation that I wanted to be alive,” she explained.
That initial certainty faded, and loneliness ensued, but Gilman said her therapist significantly helped. “One of the things she did that I appreciated is she would make a contract with me when I was feeling especially suicidal in between meetings … you sign that you won’t take your life,” Gilman said. “It just helps, on days when you can’t stay for yourself, to stay for someone else. … I really credit [my therapist] with helping me survive that time to get to a place where I did want to look for reasons to stay.”
The actress took a break from therapy until recently. As of now, she sees a therapist for “touch-ups” when she’s feeling stuck, and she has safety plans for potential mental health crises.
Gilman knows that recovering from anything is neither linear nor comfortable. “Recovery is painful, but it’s worth it,” she said. “You think recovery is going to be great and good, but most of the time, it’s uncomfortable at the beginning. That means you’re challenging yourself to change.”
Gilman doesn’t refer to herself as fully recovered, though she’s further along than she ever thought possible, she said. “I will always be in recovery. Sometimes I have my slips—and I call them my slips, not slides, because I don’t think, all of a sudden, that means I’m out of recovery [either],” she noted. “Recovery is a state of mind more than a destination or a place.”
Progress, for Gilman, happens beyond therapy by filling out mindfulness and dialectical behavioral therapy workbooks and by staying grounded. “I, as a human being who wants to be here, have an obligation to myself to find ways every day to reaffirm that. I think about being a hot air balloon and finding ways to tether myself to the world,” she said. “Small and big tethers.” Some things she loves: trees, crows, reading, mental health advocacy (she works with orgs like The Mental Health Coalition, Didi Hirsch, and To Write Love on Her Arms).
At the end of our call, I tell Gilman that her younger self would be happy seeing adult Sarah in an improved mental space. Despite tough days, she’s doing better. She is here.
“Yeah, a hundred percent. I think she’s in there; she’s watching,” Gilman says. “I mean, she didn’t think we’d live past 15. She wrote that on her wall, and it was very awkward when a painter came.” We can’t help but laugh. Because as hard as conversations like this are, life has a funny way of being, well, hilarious. And there it was…a tether.