Selena Gomez Overcame Suicidal Thoughts, Intense Bipolar Drug Detox: I Thought the World Wo

Publish date: 2024-05-23

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Selena Gomez opened up about her mental health struggles in more detail than ever before as part of her new Rolling Stone cover story. The singer and “Only Murders in the Building” star confirmed that she has entered four different treatment facilities since her early 20s. She also spent a few years contemplating suicide, although she never attempted to end her life.

“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.”

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Gomez added about contemplating suicide, “I thought the world would be better if I wasn’t there.”

For a while, Gomez attributed her mental illness to her artistic struggles as she tried to shed her Disney image and become a more mature artist. Being single at 25 years old also facilitated distress.

“I grew up thinking I would be married at 25,” Gomez said. “It wrecked me that I was nowhere near that — couldn’t be farther from it. It was so stupid, but I really thought my world was over. I never fit in with a cool group of girls that were celebrities. My only friend in the industry really is Taylor [Swift], so I remember feeling like I didn’t belong. I felt the presence of everyone around me living full lives. I had this position, and I was really happy, but… was I? Do these materialistic things make me happy? I just didn’t like who I was, because I didn’t know who I was.”

Gomez battled psychosis in 2018, and when she finally “walked out” of it she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Doctors immediately loaded her up with various medications, but she said they also had a negative effect on her: “It was just that I was gone. There was no part of me that was there anymore.”

Eventually Gomez met a psychiatrist who told her that many of the medications she was taking were actually not needed. With the psychiatrist’s help, Gomez began to detox off certain medications and felt herself coming back to a more stable place.

“He really guided me,” Gomez said. “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.”

Gomez shines an even greater light on her mental health in the upcoming Apple documentary “Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me,” which begins streaming Nov. 4. Head over to Rolling Stone’s website to read Gomez’s cover story in its entirety.

If you or anyone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources.

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