Nadine Lustre recalls time when she was told to 'just keep working' while grieving brother's death
Trigger Warning: This story deals with suicide and self-harm.
Nadine Lustre revealed she once received advice to "just keep working" while grieving the death of her brother Isaiah Lustre in 2017.
In an interview with One Down, the Deleter actress opened up about the state of her mental health after her brother passed, calling it the "most challenging" part of her life by far.
"The most challenging one that I have gone through was when my brother passed away. And my brother was going through all of these, like, challenges with his mental health as well. I was still doing a variety show every day," Nadine said while noting that it is hard for her to pick things up while grieving.
"So, can you imagine, like, I was grieving but at the same time, I'm in front of the TV, I had to smile. I had to interact with people like nothing happened. So, that was really hard."
The 30-year-old star stated that someone told her to keep working as she would "forget" about what happened to her brother. This prompted her to advocate for mental health.
"It just goes to show how uneducated and how out of touch we are when it comes to, like, mental health issues. Still to this day, like, every time I think about that time. I still don't know how I got through that," she explained.
It was in October 2017 when Isaiah, 17, took his own life.
In 2019, Nadine finally opened up about her brother's death for the first time in an interview with Karen Davila in ANC's Headstart, saying that Isaiah's death impacted her personality as a person and that she was "completely destroyed" when her brother passed away.
"I just felt like as her big sister parang mayroong I was blaming myself, actually the whole family, we were all blaming ourselves, we could have saved him, we could have done something or sana ay nagged him a bit more to open up to me."
Nadine continued, "I realized din po kasi na maybe it was meant to happen like he can't really stop that thing from happening."
On Mental Health Awareness
In a separate interview with ANC, Nadine also had the chance to discuss mental health, giving her take on the statement, "Filipinos don't believe in mental health. They just pray for the problems to go away."
"This is really bad and that's true. I will not gonna lie," she said while calling mental health a taboo topic in the Philippines.
She continued, "Honestly, when I am going through it, in some way I'm kind of prayed for it to go away because I didn't know how to handle it [because] it is still kind of taboo."
"I know that it is something I need to deal with but people are becoming more aware, there's a lot of articles, there's a lot of podcasts, I am also working on an app that gives you know services on mental health," Nadine added.
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If you or anyone you know is considering self-harm or suicide, you may call the National Mental Health Crisis hotline at 1553 (Luzon-wide, landline toll-free), 0966-351-4518 or 0917-899-USAP (8727) for Globe/TM users, or 0908-639-2672 for Smart users.
