WATCH: ‘The View’ has a candid conversation about mental health

Transcript for ‘The View’ has a candid conversation about mental health

Lady gaga just penned an emotional op-ed urgings everyone to speak out about the second leading cause of death amongst young people. It is suicide. There’s not enough support available for people at risk and we need to be clear that there’s no shame in talking openly about this, and it’s more important in the age of social media, I think, to get people to open up because it’s so easy to push people. What do you think? I worry about my kids because I have a preteen, 12, and I have a teenager that’s 16. When you look at the stats, they say half of 18 to 34-year-olds say it makes them feel unattractive, social media. That number goes up when you’re talking about teenagers and it says that teenagers on social media feel inadequate when they look at it and that inadequacy can turn to depression. That doesn’t surprise me. You know why? It’s these things. Why do you have to use my phone. Not yours. Social media. My brother in college, his roommate committed suicide. I know more people that you don’t always see the signs and then all of a sudden they’re gone. In that split second, in that moment, they make that decision and you can’t change it. You can’t turn it back around. Also we’re in a different time now. When I was a kid, if something happened at school, it stayed at school for 12 hours until you returned to school. You could leave it there. Now it follows you. So and so doesn’t like you and everybody is piling on and it becomes a feeling where the pain and despair of it is your entire life instead of 5 or 8 hours of your life. And the self-worth is attached to it. I feel inadequate on social media. The people that I know that have committed suicide are veterans. 20 veterans a day commit suicide from PTSD. I think we should be talking in a broad sense but because there’s so many veterans in my family, we are still not doing enough with the va, we are not doing enough to support veterans to integrate back into suicide. Sometimes it’s because you went to war and you’re dealing with the ramifications. There’s so many reasons that people take their own life and all of these things, it’s war, it’s social media, it’s all of these things, but it’s also how we respond to it, you know. We’ve made — you know, there are certain things, in the old days you couldn’t talk about cancer because no one would talk about it, you know. We can’t afford to do that with this because it’s not just young people. It’s people my age, it’s people your age, it’s people all of our ages who are thinking they’re not good enough or they’re inadequate or they don’t have what’s needed. And so we all have to sort of be stewards of each other. Right. It’s lady gaga. We have to look out for each other. There’s people that you would think have it all. Anthony bourdain, Kate spade. It’s empowering when someone like lady gaga gets up to accept an award and she says you may think I have everything in life but I have struggled with mental illness. One thing that you’re saying, whoopi, that struck me, we do not talk about intense or grief enough. I’m in intense grief right now. I’m still struggling how to talk about it on the show. Mornings and nights are real hard for me. I’m not suicidal, but we should be able to talk in our culture about dying, cancer, grief without stigma. Let me say this to you, I also am still in grief of my brother and my mom because it evolves, it does things. It doesn’t change. You keep thinking, oh, there’s going to come a day where I’ll be back to what I was. It’s an evolutionary process, and so we all are going through it so we have to become steward of each other.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.