Selena Gomez opens up about mental health struggles ahead of new documentary

3 November, 2022

Selena Gomez

Ahead of the release of a documentary charting her rise to fame and a decade-long struggle with mental health issues, Selena Gomez has shed new light on her experiences with mental health and being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

In an interview with Rolling Stone US, to promote Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me, the singer revealed that she was in her early twenties when she first began experiencing difficulties with her mental health. “I started to feel like I was not in control of what I was feeling, whether that was really great or really bad.” She went on to detail episodes of mania – in which she wouldn’t sleep for days and convinced herself she needed to buy everyone she knew a car – that were then followed by episodes of depression.

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“I didn’t want anyone to talk to me,” she said. “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.”

The singer admitted that for a few years, she had also experienced suicidal thoughts, but had never attempted to end her own life. “I thought the world would be better if I wasn’t there,” she said.

In 2018, Gomez began hearing voices, which led to an episode of psychosis. She spent several months in a treatment facility, and shortly afterwards was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Gomez also said that after she left the facility, she saw a psychiatrist who realised that she had been given a lot of medications that she shouldn’t have been taking and took her off all but two of them. Doing so vastly improved her condition.

“He really guided me,” Gomez explained. “But I had to detox, essentially, from the medications I was on. 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.”

The singer has also released an emotional new song that shares its title with the Apple+ documentary, which delves deeper into the emotional reality of managing one’s mental health. You can listen to the track and watch its lyric video below.