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Selena Gomez has revealed that she contemplated suicide for several years after battling psychosis, which led to her being diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
The 30-year-old actress exposed her mental health issues in a raw new interview with rolling stone.
“I thought the world would be a better place if I wasn’t there,” she told the publication.
Selena Gomez has revealed that she contemplated suicide for years; pictured Wednesday
Gomez opened up in an interview about her struggles with mental health.
“I’m going to be very open about this with everyone: I’ve been to four treatment centers,” she told the publication.
“I think as I started to get into my early twenties, it really started to get dark, when I started to feel like I had no control over what I was feeling, whether it was really great or really bad.”
According to Rolling Stone, Selena experienced a rollercoaster of highs and lows that would last for weeks or months. Selena also couldn’t determine what exactly led to the emotions.
Gomez featured in the trailer of her new documentary, My Mind & Me
There were also times when Selena couldn’t sleep for days.
Sometimes she was convinced that she had to buy a new car for everyone she knew – a symptom of mania. ‘I have a gift and I wanted to share it with people’, she said at the time when publishing her thought process.
She described the lows, saying, “It would start with a depression, then it would go into isolation.
Gomez pictured in her new Apple TV+ documentary
“Then I just wasn’t able to get out of 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 took me weeks to lay in bed, even getting out of breath when I walked downstairs.’
Selena believes that several factors caused her anxiety, including her career, her health and failing to achieve certain life goals she set for herself as a young girl.
“I grew up thinking I would get married at 25,” she told Rolling Stone. “It hurt me not to be around there – I couldn’t be further from it. It was so stupid, but I really thought my world was over.’
Selena struggled to express her issues with friends who weren’t famous, also admitting that she “never” fit in with the cool celebrity group.
‘I grew up thinking I’d get married at 25’: Selena thinks several factors led to her anxiety, including her career, her health and failing to achieve certain life goals she set for herself as a young girl posed
“I never belonged to a cool group of girls who were celebrities. My only friend in the industry is really Taylor [Swift], so I remember feeling like I didn’t belong. I felt the presence of everyone around me living a full life. I had this position and I was very happy, but… was I? Do these materialistic things make me happy?’ she said.
“I just didn’t like who I was because I didn’t know who I was.”
Selena started hearing voices in 2018, which eventually led to psychosis that landed her in a treatment center.
The singer has little memory of this period, but knows that she spent several months in the treatment facility with extreme paranoia. She was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder and took numerous medications prescribed by doctors in the hope that everything would work.
Selena struggled to express her issues with friends who weren’t famous, also admitting that she “never” fit in with the cool celebrity group
“It was just that I was gone,” she said of the effect the drugs had on her. “There was no part of me that was more.”
She eventually left the institution and began working with a psychiatrist who removed all but two of her medications.
“He really guided me,” Selena said. I essentially had to detox from the drugs I was taking. I had to learn to remember certain words. I’d forget where I was when we were talking. I had a hard time (a) accepting that I was bipolar, but (b) coping with it because it wouldn’t go away.”
One thing that did help Selena was philanthropy. She started taking an interest in politics, working on the Netflix shows Living Undocumented and 13 Reasons Why, and founding the Rare Impact Fund.
Unfortunately, due to the two medications she is currently on, Selena is unlikely to be able to bear children of her own.
The painful realization caused Selena to burst into tears in her car after visiting a friend who was trying to start their own family.
“That’s a very big, big, present thing in my life,” she told the site. But Selena believes ‘however I need them, I’ll have them’.