The Challenge star Tori Deal opens up about how antidepressants saved her from 'rock bottom'

The Challenge competitor Tori Deal has never shied away from sharing every aspect of her life on TV and social media. After making her reality TV debut on Are You the One?, she transitioned over to MTV's long-running reality competition series The Challenge where her relationship drama was always highlighted in a big way, every season she was on. And now that her ex-fiancé Jordan Wiseley is about to enter the game on The Challenge: Ride or Dies — much to her total and complete shock — Deal found herself in the middle of even more romantic intrigue and drama than ever before. But this time, things were different.

Before season 38 began, Deal made the decision to go on antidepressants, and in this week's episode of The Challenge: Ride or Dies, she opens up about her mental health journey and how going on medication saved her from "rock bottom."

"I've had a life coach who's just absolutely incredible for the last three years, I've been talking to a therapist for the last six months, and even still with all of that work, the medication is the thing that really tipped it over the edge," Deal says in an exclusive interview with EW along with mental health expert Dr. Jessi Gold (who helped write MTV's Mental Health Media Guide). "I understand why people want to just do therapy and talk about therapy, but if you need that extra little nudge, that's exactly what helps me. It helps me take everything that I've learned and already understood and really sat with and internalized, and now I can feel fine about it all. I've done the work mentally and now physically with the medicine I can change my brain and it's amazing. It's been very powerful and freeing."

Below, Deal and Gold dive deep on how reality TV and social media affect mental health and what fans can learn from Deal's journey this season.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Tori, what happens in this week's episode that inspired you to share your mental health journey?

TORI DEAL: It's a moment where it's me reflecting with Devin and having a conversation about my relationship with Jordan — and that leads up to him surprising at the end of the evening in the elimination. The conversation goes from us talking about how I feel like I've changed so much in the past couple years, and when you watch yourself on TV and you experience all of social media and hate on these platforms, and obviously when you go through a traumatic breakup and it's all over the public news and you've traveled across the country to move back in with your mom, you can hit a rock bottom.

I have always had a little undertone of depression in my life, and I've never felt like I needed to receive help for it because I'm high functioning, but it hit a point where I just couldn't be myself. I didn't want to leave my room. I just wasn't me. It was very hard for people to see that because when I talk to people, I kind of become alive. It's something that lived underneath my life for a while and I never really talked about it. With all the growth that's happened over the years, it's just something I'm truly honored to share because I've shared so many bad things — not even bad, but you know, I've shared things that I'm not proud of, but this for sure is one that I am.

I got help from Sara Bareilles when she posted about it — her one little Instagram post sent me in the direction to go get help and I think that when you see somebody that you wouldn't expect to talk about it talk about it, it really does change things. I'm so happy now, I've never felt this good in my life. I grew up with my my sister and my dad and I would be like, "How are they so happy all the time?" I never got it and now I get it and it's just so freeing. I hope everybody who has been through something similar that I have can find this peace as well. If this helps anyone else get the help they need, then it's worth it.

How did you two meet and start working together?

DEAL: Thankfully, in the beginning of going on the show, the producers love to call cast members and be like, "What's changed in your life?" And I mean, a lot had changed, and one of the biggest things was I was talking about being on antidepressants. They were like, 'Wow, it's not really something that's talked about too much." And especially in the nature of reality TV, I think it should be talked about more because there's plenty of people who are definitely suffering from something. No offense, I was one of them! It is good to talk about it so thankfully, Dr. Jessi came on the team and we've been figuring out ways to talk about it and promote it in a healthy way and tell the story in a way that feels good for everybody. I've gotten a lot of support, and it's been incredible.

DR. JESSI GOLD: People think telling your story is something that you have to do or something that's easy to do, but even when you're at a point that is comfortable and you're ready, it doesn't mean you owe everybody everything. You still get control over what you want to say, you still get control over how you say it, and it's a little less easy to do that on a reality show. A lot of what we talked about is that it's still your story, however you tell it. She wanted to share, "This helped me, I got meds, I feel better. I feel the best I've ever felt," but how do you tell that in a way that inspires people to get help if they need it? That's really important but it's not something she owed anybody, and so trying to get to the place where we're balancing that has been what we talked about.

Tori, how has being on reality TV impacted your mental health as you've navigated finding that balance?

DEAL: It's been a battle of a lifetime, for sure. With any field you go into, I don't expect it to be perfect or to not require work. But the emotional work it's taken to really find my center and my peace with the way social media is, the way other cast members can act, the nature of reality TV, the drama, it is a really tough place to navigate. That's why it's led me here and that's why I finally was like, I can't actually live internally here anymore. I'm not happy, every day I wake up and I'm stressed to the max and just not producing the things I want, not creating what I want to create, I'm not living my life. That dead end, that rock bottom, it's what really opened the door to going on medication and now I don't give a s---!

[Laughs] I mean, I do care, I really do, but I can't tell you how much it put more important things into perspective. I am truly thankful for my life now. Literally, to wake up and smile at my cat in the morning, those simple moments are everything to me. And before they were so clouded with fear of being judged on social media or what is this edit going to look like or this or that, and now it's not that those thoughts don't come up but they're not consuming me. They don't drown me and I am just living happily. I'm noticing that the most in the small moments.

Only a very small percentage of the world can relate to being on reality TV but almost everyone is on social media these days. Dr. Gold, how have you noticed a shift in the conversations about mental health as people address it more on social media and on TV?

GOLD: More people are talking about it now, for sure. Over the pandemic that definitely grew in part because we were all stuck at home and having the same experiences and saying, "I'm tired, I'm baking bread, I have nothing to do, I'm sad," it felt very normal because everybody was doing it. It didn't even really feel like you were sharing a mental health problem. It felt like you were sharing a day-to-day activity. That became pretty common for people and then those conversations about mental health became a bit easier for people. And then with well-known people like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles sharing at the same time, it compounded it so people felt more comfortable sharing on social media.

But I do think the back side of that is the same thing Tori experiences but to a lesser degree, which is if you're on social media and you have an account that people are watching, do you need to share? What do you share and how do you shape that in a way that feels comfortable to you? And are you curating that so it's not really you vs. if you're making it more realistic? That part of social media can be more detrimental to your mental health. People feel like they owe something even if they don't have a lot of followers, let alone if they have as many followers as Tori does.

There's a lot of pressure to share all the time, and in the younger generation, I see a lot of college kids in my practice and that's a pretty common feeling. "I consider myself real, this is what being real is, right? Here's everything about me, but I wasn't really ready to tell you everything about me." That's a hard part of social media, and just being on it and having comments and self-esteem stuff, it can suck you down a rabbit hole of anger and anxiety just because the world is pretty dark and scary. It's hard to turn that off even if you want to.

Taking all that into account, Tori, why did you want to share your mental health journey on the show in such a big way this season?

DEAL: Think about all of the things that I've shared with the world that I wasn't ready to share, because maybe they were shared on my behalf without my permission. My life has been been analyzed or shared with no context of why I've made certain decisions and what I'm going through internally. When I look at the whole thing, if I take a step back and I see the amount of negative things that I've shared or I've been a part of, why wouldn't I want to share this positive moment? This one is important for the entire story arc of who I am as a human. I just see the importance to truly share this because I want people to see and understand how I feel now and this growth that I've experienced.

I've gotten a lot of hate and a lot of judgment, and when you get judged, you either shut out the world and you stay the same, or you decide to grow and figure out what the issue is and try to be a better person. I'm just going to be relentless in my pursuit for growth forever. Whatever I can do to share that and keep continuously promoting that, I'm going to do. That's why it feels so good to talk about. I've already seen the first three episodes [of this season] and I bawled my eyes out. It's still difficult and it's still a lot but I'm better at dealing with social media and dealing with people's comments. I'm just going to be peaceful with it. Whatever people are going to say about it, they're going to say about it. They've already said bad things about me or they've said good things about me, and I know where I stand now. I'm just going to go with the flow for the rest of this season and just accept it.

What do you hope people learn from watching you share your own experiences?

DEAL: [Pauses] This is going to make me cry. Oh my god. [Starts crying] If anybody really does feel that sad, you deserve to feel better. I just hope somebody gets to feel how I feel because it's been so transformative for my life and I'm just so grateful. Sara Bareilles helped me! If I can help someone like she helped me … I mean, I love her songs, but I would have never thought she would have had that much of an impact on my life. Hopefully this little moment will have an impact on somebody's too. They can wake up happy too.

GOLD: We take for granted what we expect people's lives are like by watching it and what it really is like to be the human person on the show and experiencing it. Even the thought of having to see it twice, I think people don't realize what that would be like for someone. It just puts into perspective what it is really like and how hard that can be on your mental health. It's important that people realize that the people they're talking to on social media are humans and so to be a little bit nicer about some of that stuff. That's part of why it's important that Tori talks about her mental health because it's not a bubble.

I told Tori at the beginning, not a lot of people talk about medication, and as a prescriber I really like when people talk about medicine because we're not at the phase of talking about it publicly as much as we do therapy. Therapy is trendier and a little bit easier for people to digest and meds are still pretty stigmatized and people don't really understand it. It makes a big difference for people to realize you don't have to be so bad that you can't get out of bed and you can't function and all this stuff — yes, some people are like that. But there are also people that you see every day that look fine that actually are really struggling, and meds make them be able to do what they want to do better. That's my entire patient population. I take meds too and it was a hard thing for me to say publicly despite actually being somebody who prescribed them! There's just this added weight to medicine, and I really appreciate what Tori's been talking about because I think it'll make a big difference.

The Challenge: Ride or Dies airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on MTV.

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