Selena Gomez has always been vocal about her mental health struggles. But in her new documentary entitled My Mind and Me, the actress and singer revealed intimate details about an illness that she hasn’t talked much about before. She also shared how she managed to overcome these personal battles and find peace within herself.
Gomez said she started to feel like she was losing control of her emotions. She shared that she was experiencing routine manic episodes, she couldn’t sleep for days on end, and she began hearing voices.
She described having really low episodes where she went into isolation, saying, “Then it just was me not being able to move from my bed. I didn’t want anyone to talk to me.” Gomez admitted to staying in bed for weeks and losing her breath from simple tasks, like walking downstairs.
Her extremely public breakup with her ex-boyfriend Justin Bieber, and her medical treatment for lupus, added to the pressure that she was feeling. She decided to go to a mental institution, where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder — an illness that causes unusual shifts in mood, energy, activity levels, concentration, and the ability to carry out day-to-day tasks.
She first spoke about it on Miley Cyrus’s Instagram live: “After years of going through a lot of different things, I realized that I was bipolar.” In one article, she was quoted saying, “I felt a huge weight lifted off me when I found out. I could take a deep breath and go, ’Okay, that explains so much.’”
At first, Gomez admitted to being paranoid about the doctors and the treatment. She explained that the medications were affecting her negatively. But then she found one psychiatrist who guided her and helped her recover. “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 is currently taking medications for her bipolar disorder, which may affect her ability to get pregnant. “That’s a very big, big, present thing in my life,” Gomez added.
But this is not to say that she doesn’t want to have kids of her own. She also said, “However I’m meant to have them, I will,” which shows that Gomez is still looking forward to being a mom.
“I’ve been writing a lot. I think that that’s been helping me process what’s been going on,” said Gomez. She also tried treating her disorder as a “friend” that she lives with.
She underwent behavioral therapy and experimented with different treatment approaches that might help her face her condition.
She was once the most followed person on Instagram, but she sacrificed interacting with millions of her followers for the sake of her mental health. In 2017, she gave her assistant full control over her social media accounts.
“I suddenly had to learn how to be with myself. That was annoying because, in the past, I could spend hours looking at other people’s lives.” The lack of social media also allowed her to be more “present” and have more time for other projects. She created Rare Beauty, a makeup brand that also has a charitable counterpart, the Rare Impact Fund, which sponsors mental health services.
And as part of her advocacy, Gomez also launched her own media platform called Wondermind, which aims to provide tools and resources for those who want to work on their mental fitness. She is also focused on spreading kindness: “Everybody be kind to each other and just focus on what’s going on in the real world.”
What do you think of Selena Gomez’s journey? How do you protect your own mental health?
It sounds like she's making efforts daily to better her coping strategies and to assist others as well. Her charitable programs and advocating for people like herself are commendable and she seems very heartfelt in her endeavors. I hope she will continue to have improvement in her own life and great success with her goals.
