CNN’s SE Cupp Opens Up On Moment She Reached Her ‘Breaking Point’ — And the Road Back

CNN host and columnist S.E. Cupp opened up about the importance of mental health in a new interview with Mediaite.

I spoke with Cupp, the New York Daily News columnist and host of Unfiltered on CNN, about her decision to reveal her own anxiety disorder in the hope of helping others identify the symptoms. In a 2021 episode of Unfiltered , Cupp revealed she was diagnosed with anxiety disorder.

In our interview, for the premiere of Mediaite’s Behind the Byline , Cupp said her anxiety hit her “like a ton of bricks.”

“The way I describe it is very bluntly: I had a nervous breakdown,” Cupp said, “which happened quickly and unexpectedly, and I was not the same after.”

“It’s not like I got anxiety suddenly,” she said. “I had always had it and I just didn’t know that it was building to this breaking point.”

She said her work covering heavy subjects contributed to her anxiety. “When it comes to what I do for a living, the news was very triggering and I couldn’t make sense of it,” she said. “My mind was really jumbled. The only thing I could write about or talk about with any coherence was how I was feeling. And so I wrote about the way I was feeling, for lack of ability to write about anything else, clearly.”

Yet it wasn’t until Cupp started covering other public figures who were open about their mental health that she decided to speak out.

“I had just covered a bunch of high profile people’s mental health. Naomi Osaka , Simone Biles , Meghan Markle , all these people were coming out and talking about their mental health struggles, and I defended them and talked about how brave it was,” she said. “I thought, well, I’d be such a hypocrite if I hid this from everybody. And so I talked about it openly,” the nationally syndicated columnist told Mediaite.

Cupp, who in addition to her CNN show hosts Battleground: The Swing States on Fox, said others in the media business confided their own mental health struggles to her after she revealed hers.

“I found a lot of people, especially in my business, come forward and say, ‘me too’, and ‘thank you so much’ or ‘I had not heard anxiety explained that way before and that’s really helpful because I don’t think we talk about anxiety in very helpful ways.’”

Cupp, the mother to a nine-year-old son, said it is her aim to shed light on anxiety to help younger generations, as well as parents, understand the disorder.

“It’s debilitating. It’s paralyzing,” Cupp said. “It’s changed my brain and so I talk about it in hopes that people, who might be younger than me or parents might hear, hear about my struggle and maybe some notes will sound familiar, or it will encourage someone to ask their kid, is this why you’re doing this? Or, is this how you’re feeling?”

Cupp noted that journalists covering war are particularly susceptible to these kinds of challenges.

“One of the medications I’m on is for PTSD,” Cupp said. “In addition to covering politics, I cover foreign policy. I covered the Syrian war for over a decade now, it’s still going on, and saw images and videos that were too graphic to make it to air.”

Cupp also serves as a board member for INARA, an aid organization that works with children who are victims of war in Gaza, Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere. INARA was founded by former CNN foreign correspondent Arwa Damon .

“That is really difficult work,” Cupp said. “It’s fulfilling work, but it’s really difficult. And what I’ve learned in therapy is that as journalists, we compartmentalize everything we see and cover. It’s part of the job. So I’m going to put it over here. I’ll deal with my feelings another time. Except we don’t deal with our feelings.”

Cupp continued: “We don’t actually ever circle back when the job is done and deal with our feelings about seeing what we saw or covering what we cover. And so the compartmentalizing is, defense mechanism. It’s a necessary thing we have to do to get through our day. But we promise ourselves we’re going to deal with our mental health at some point, and we don’t. Ignoring it and hoping it will go away or get better, it’s just not a thing. It piles on.”

For Cupp, her work is therapeutic. In addition to her nationally syndicated column, her CNN show, her role as a CNN commentator, and Battleground , she is launching a podcast, Off the Cupp with iHeart Radio in October featuring celebrities, politicos, and journalists to talk about matters of the heart.

Watch the full interview above.