Selena Gomez has opened up about a dark time in her life when she was detoxing from bipolar disorder drugs and contemplated taking her own life.
In a new cover story for Rolling Stone, the 30-year-old superstar said she bounced around numerous treatment facilities throughout her 20s, and that her situation wasn’t improving.
“I’m going to be very open with everybody about this: I’ve been to four treatment centers,” Gomez said. “I think when I started hitting my early 20s is when it started to get really dark, when I started to feel like I was not in control of what I was feeling, whether that was really great or really bad.”
She added that while she never attempted suicide, she spent several years thinking “the world would be better if I wasn’t there.”
“It would start with depression, then it would go into isolation,” she said. “Then it just was me not being able to move from my bed. I didn’t want anyone to talk to me. My friends would bring me food because they love me, but none of us knew what it was. Sometimes it was weeks I’d be in bed, to where even walking downstairs would get me out of breath.”
Gomez’s disease escalated to the point where she began hearing voices in 2018 which triggered “an episode of psychosis.” While Gomez didn’t recall much of that time, she remembers ending up in another treatment center full of debilitating paranoia. During her time at the facility, she was prescribed intense anti-psychotic medications, and she said she slowly “walked” out of her episode, before ultimately being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
However, she learned through a new psychiatrist that a lot of the medications she was on weren’t suitable for her, so she began an intense period of detox.
“It was just that I was gone,” she said of the drugs she was on. “There was no part of me that was there anymore.”
She added, “I had to learn how to remember certain words. I would forget where I was when we were talking. It took a lot of hard work for me to (a) accept that I was bipolar, but (b) learn how to deal with it because it wasn’t going to go away.”
Gomez and her mental health battles are the focus of the new Apple documentary titled Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me, which hits the streaming platform on Friday.
“It makes me proud I’m actually talking about things that matter, not sitting here just talking about my brand and ‘I look great, and I have this and this.’ There’s already enough of that,” she told Rolling Stone. “I just constantly remind myself that there’s a reason I’m here.”
