‘I Thought the World Would Be Better If I Wasn’t There,’ Selena Gomez says Of Her Mental Health Struggles.

Selena Gomez has been candid about her mental health challenges and feelings of hopelessness as a child and young woman growing up in front of cameras. However, in a new Rolling Stone cover story, the Only Murders in the Building star opens up about the depths of her battle with depression and bipolar disorder, themes she tackles with her trademark no-nonsense attitude in the new Apple TV+ documentary, Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me (Nov. 4).

“Because I have the platform that I do, it’s almost as if I’m sacrificing myself a little bit for a greater purpose,” she explained to the magazine. “I don’t want to sound dramatic, but I almost didn’t publish this. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t convinced I could do it a few weeks ago.”

However, she tells RS that sharing the experience was vital, which may explain why she also detailed some of her most difficult struggles off-camera. “I’m going to be really honest with everyone: I’ve been to four treatment programmes,” Gomez added. “I think it started to get extremely dark when I was in my early twenties, when I started to feel like I wasn’t in control of what I was experiencing, whether it was really good or really horrible.”

Those high and low phases left her not sleeping for days or convinced that she should buy a car for everyone she knew and that she had a gift to share with the world. That mania, however, would give way to the lowest lows, which she described as beginning with depression and then tipping into terrifying isolation. “Then it was simply me not being able to get out of bed.” “I didn’t want anyone talking to me,” she explained. “Because they love me, my friends would bring me food, but none of us knew what it was.” I’d stay in bed for weeks at a time, and even walking downstairs would leave me out of breath.”

Despite her claim that she never tried suicide, Gomez told RS that she had considered it for several years. “I thought the world would be a better place if I weren’t here,” she explained. With her mental health issues and a diagnosis of the autoimmune disease lupus necessitating a kidney transplant in 2017 that resulted in a potentially fatal complication, Gomez expressed concern that the life she’d once imagined was out of reach.

“I grew up expecting to be married at 25,” she explained. “It wrecked me that I wasn’t even close to that — couldn’t be further away.” It was so stupid, but I thought my life was over.” A year following the surgery, Gomez said she began hearing voices, which finally prompted an episode of psychosis. Though her memories of the period are vague today, the RS piece recounts her winding up in a treatment centre and spending “several months in paranoia, unable to trust anyone, fearing they were all out to get her.”

That led to her bipolar diagnosis, which helped her make sense of what had had happened, but also meant she was so highly medicated that she began to lose her core self. “It was just that I was gone,” she claimed of the drugs’ effect on her. “There was no part of me that was there anymore.” A psychiatrist pulled back all but two of the drugs and as Gomez began to detox she said she had to “learn how to remember certain words. I would forget where I was when we were conversing. It took a lot of hard work for me to (a) acknowledge that I was bipolar, but (b) learn how to cope with it because it wasn’t going to go away.”

Aware that the psychosis could return and that her bipolar diagnosis will have to be controlled for the rest of her life, Gomez said after her initial reservations she felt the AppleTV+ doc was a part of her tale she wanted to share. “I understand it has a significant message, but am I the proper one to bring it to light?” “I’m not sure,” she said, perplexed. “I wished for someone to tell me, ‘Selena, this is too intense.'” ‘I’m really moved, but are you ready to do this?’ said everyone. And are you at ease?'”

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