Miss Universe hopeful talks about mental health issues
UW student says fear keeps some from getting diagnosed, herself included
Psychologist, examine thyself.
Tell us about your mental health issues. Tell us you have suffered, too.
“I know I definitely have struggled at times,” said Emma Wehner, a 22-year-old University of Waterloo honours psychology major and Miss Universe contestant.
“There have been times where it’s been difficult, been over- whelming — and challenging. I’m a perfectionist. If I don’t raise myself to those standards, I am really hard on myself.”
Yet, the graduate of Kitchener’s Eastwood Collegiate is full of energy and confidence.
She’s a model. She’s an actress. She’s athletic and articulate. Her always-encouraging Eastwood friend Melanie Williamson was Miss Canada International two years ago.
The Guelph-born Wehner graduates with a degree in a month from a world-class school where her mom Elizabeth is a cataloguer in the Dana Porter Library.
She loves to camp and hike. She can even bake scrumptious banana-chocolate chip muffins, just like her Aunt Rose. She adores chocolate, refuses to diet and loves the gym.
“Gotta work out,” she said. “It all balances out.”
She’s the complete package of happy young person poised to tackle the universe, right?
“Bit of a complicated story,” she said.
But new complications are not necessarily bad things.
On an online whim three weeks ago, she surfed blindly for a smaller beauty contest. Instead, she found the page of the Miss Universe Canada Western Ontario preliminary competition in Windsor on April 11.
The entry form popped up. Applicants were still being accepted. She clicked.
So she’ll wear a bikini with confidence on the Capitol Theatre stage. She’ll aim to exude confidence for girls of all ages in a nightgown competition. She’s pretty and scholarly and doesn’t care if she’s the only girl this side of her former home of London who’s entered. On the weekend, she eagerly went to pageant practice in Windsor.
And yet, despite a staggering supply of assertiveness, she suspects she has a mental health condition. Diagnosis is something she dare not pursue. Diagnoses scares her. She wants to know, but she doesn’t want the world to know.
Why? She fears the biases that endure.
“Being someone so interested in psychology, and seeing the stigma involved, it has caused me to fear getting labelled or stigmatized myself,” said Wehner, whose studies include a minor in sexuality, marriage and family studies.
“I’ve never really been diagnosed because of that fear, because of that stigma.”
So now she wears the words “Mental Health” on her personal sash as she pursues the path to the Miss Universe crown. The stigma is the enemy she’ll pursue when she begins a research career aimed at finding positive approaches to helping people feel better.
“How can we motivate people to go to the gym or quit smoking” she said. “It’s all the little things that work together to increase someone’s well-being, increase someone’s mental health.”
The alternative, allowing the stigma to simmer in silence, is unthinkable to her. When she went to Eastwood, she recalls the suicide of another girl at the school. It hurts her.
“Just saying that really decks me,” she said.
And how can you tell the inner turmoil any of us may be hiding? That’s the essential mystery of our time. Wehner said she’s grown up watching her family deal with mental health issues. She now wants to find a way to strip the world of the stigma that shrouds the pain no outsider can see.
“It’s invisible,” she said. “You can’t say, ‘This person has this.’ You just can’t. There’s such a stigma around it.”
Last week, Wehner held a fundraiser for her Miss Universe pursuit. She raised about $400. It’ll cost about $1,200 to pay her pageant costs. So she’s set up a fundraising page at http:// www.gofundme.com/emmawehner to ease the burden.
In the meantime, she said she’s got the full support of mom and her dad Gordon, a consultant who works in Cambridge.
She never thought she’d be a pageant girl. Neither did they. Her mom was stunned to find out her daughter had entered the contest.
“That’s OK, mom, it’s as big a surprise to me too,” she told Elizabeth.
And now that Wehner is in it, she’s in it to win it.
“This competition wants and aspires for the women to be role models,” she said.
“That’s what I hope to be.”