My life looked perfect but I’d wake up thinking, ‘Why am I still alive?’

An obsession with social media took LEANNE MASKELL to the brink of suicide and, says the model and activist, it’s now destroying the mental health of an entire generation. But, as she tells Anna Moore, it’s never too late to break the habit

Leanne Maskell was 24 and living in Australia when she began to plan her suicide. No one knew or could have guessed because she seemed to have everything. Leanne – 5ft 11in, a beguiling, pale-blue-eyed blonde – had worked as a model for more than a decade (appearing in Vogue and I-D), having started at 13 years old. She had graduated with a law degree then taken off to Bondi Beach. Her Instagram page showed her modelling bikinis for big brands, partying on superyachts and travelling on private jets.

From a young age, Leanne knew how it felt when the way your life looks drifts far from reality. Modelling thrives on creating perfect images. The constant pressure from agencies and clients to lose weight had led her to an eating disorder. At 14, she was modelling wedding dresses. At 21, she was strapping on fake bellies for maternity swimwear. (‘My sister was pregnant at the time and said, “What are you doing? Pregnant women will look at those pictures and have no idea that the models are young size eights!”’) Those bikini shoots in Australia were so heavily edited that Leanne didn’t think they even looked like her, and the photos on her own feed were carefully Photoshopped by Leanne herself.

‘By the time I was 24, I was really self-obsessed,’ she says. ‘My dimensions had to be perfect. And I had to get the same number of likes each time.’ The people she tagged in her pictures weren’t real friends – she hung out with them simply to create content and raise her profile. And even her following was fake: as instructed by her

agency, Leanne paid for Instagram followers and likes and comments. All the models she knew did the same.

In her new book The Reality Manifesto, Leanne, now 29, brilliantly sets out the multiple ways that ‘living virtually’ – immersed in social media, cut off from real life and close relationships – impacts brain health, especially in the young. But back then, aged 24 on Bondi Beach, the ultimate ‘influencer playground’, she had no idea why she felt so bad.

‘My life looked perfect,’ she says. ‘I had amazing opportunities, money, “beauty” – although I didn’t feel beautiful – but I was waking in the middle of the night crying, thinking, “Why am I still alive?”’ she says. ‘I thought I must have some serious mental health disorders and I remember googling them – bipolar, borderline personality disorder – and thinking, “I’ve got all of them.”’

After finding the perfect ‘suicide spot’ (for weeks, Leanne obsessively viewed its location on her phone) and setting a date to do it (a Sunday), she decided to enjoy her last week alive. ‘I had one week left to live, so I should be able to eat what I wanted – it didn’t matter if I got fat. I began each day with a chocolate almond croissant. I’d never have allowed myself that before,’ she says. ‘I stopped using my phone so much, and doing things to create “content”.

‘I remember going for a three-hour walk without my phone and just felt completely different afterwards. I had a photoshoot, too, and it was incredible: for once, I wasn’t overthinking it or worrying about whether I was good enough. I just really enjoyed it. By the end of that week, I was thinking, “What the hell am I doing? It doesn’t make sense to kill myself.”’

It was the start of a long recovery.

Leanne deleted her Instagram account. ‘Getting rid of the whole thing felt amazing,’ she says. She started building closer, real-life relationships with family and friends – previously, they had stayed in touch by ‘liking’ each other’s social media posts. Instead of self-diagnosing through

Google, Leanne sought medical help from a psychiatrist, who explained that she had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and she began a treatment

‘AFTER TAKING A THREE-HOUR WALK WITHOUT MY PHONE I FELT COMPLETELY DIFFERENT’

programme. For the first time, she could make sense of her racing mind and lifelong struggle with focus and attention span.

She also wrote two books. The first,

The Model Manifesto, shone a light on exploitation in the modelling industry. The response was huge.

The second was ADHD: An A-Z, an indepth account of living with the disorder, which led companies such as Microsoft and Adidas to request that she come in and talk to employees. Other readers contacted her directly for help, so Leanne trained as an ADHD coach, too.

Very soon, she began to doubt that the problems she was hearing about from parents and their children could all be down to ADHD. The teenager who wouldn’t come out of his room; the 15-year-old who was part of a ‘self-harm squad’ at school; the countless young people who had diagnosed themselves with ADHD because they’d seen it on TikTok, who couldn’t sit through a 45-minute maths lesson or even get to the end of a YouTube video because a 15-second TikTok clip was all they were used to.

‘Parents were calling me about their children who were self-harming or suicidal or isolated or unable to focus, and the one thing that seemed to link all of the stories was a serious addiction to social media,’ says Leanne. She suspected that many of them didn’t have ADHD, but instead had variable attention stimulus trait (VAST), a term used to describe what happens when ADHD-like symptoms (lowered attention span, inability to focus) are caused by technology, social media and screen addiction.

At a very young age, modelling had hurled Leanne into a fake world where she was never quite thin or perfect enough; today, all teenagers live in that world. Their phones, with their constant notifications, the ‘if you like that, you’ll like this’ algorithms, have led them ever further from reality and hooked them into unhappy habit loops.

The Reality Manifesto takes a deep dive into the dangers of social media with a user-friendly A-to-Z format. (B is for Beauty, E is for Expectations, J is for Jealousy, X is for X-rated...)

When it comes to beauty and body image, it’s not surprising that Leanne has plenty to say. ‘Before social media, you might see a billboard of an attractive actress and compare yourself, feel bad, then walk past,’ she says. ‘Now, if you’ve looked at those images just once on your phone, you will be targeted from the minute you wake up, and your insecurities will be exploited to keep you hooked.

‘You’ll see it in so many forms,’ she continues. ‘The influencers on your Instagram feed, the teenagers dancing in TikToks who look thinner than you, the filters that change