Mental Health Mondays

The Big Issue discovers that Miss SA 2020 uses her celebrity status to confront all forms of bullying, exposing behaviour that culminates in long-term mental health issues.

Brightening Instagram’s already color-saturated world, Shudufhadzo (Shudu) Musida is using her Miss SA 2020 title and influence to shine a spotlight on all aspects of mental health in a series of weekly Instagram broadcasts titled Mindful Mondays.

In each segment, she chats to specialists about a wide range of issues that affect how we cope in our daily lives. Something Shudu has always been candid about is how bullying affected her own mental health.

“The bullying happened when I moved to a new school. Before the age of nine, I was a bubbly little girl, but then people found it okay to bring me down at a time when I was only trying to discover myself. The ramifications were enormous,” she says.

In a desperate attempt to prevent the bullying, Shudu started to dress like a boy. “It got to the point where I thought if I covered up and didn’t draw too much attention to myself, maybe it would stop. I developed low self-esteem and it took me a long time to realize that it was actually never about me, but about the people who were doing the bullying.”