Selena Gomez is opening up about being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, saying the discovery gave her a sense of relief after years of struggling.
The singer graced the cover of ELLE’s September issue, and in the cover story, she discussed her mental health, including her bipolar disorder diagnosis.
“I felt a huge weight lifted off me when I found out,” she told the magazine. “I could take a deep breath and go, ‘Okay, that explains so much.’”
As fans of the actress already know, Gomez has had quite a rough past few years, which includes a 2014 lupus diagnosis, a kidney transplant, chemotherapy, and multiple public break ups. Throughout all of that, Gomez told ELLE that her desire to help others allowed her to keep her strength.
“There were all things that honestly should have taken me down,” she said. “Every time I went through something, I was like, ‘What else? What else am I going to have to deal with?’”
In order to power through, Selena said she told herself, “You‘re going to help people,” and that that sentiment was ”really what kept me going.”
“There could have been a time when I wasn’t strong enough, and would have done something to hurt myself,” she continued.
The 29-year-old been open about her battles with anxiety and depression over the years, revealing her bipolar diagnosis in April 2020 during an episode of Miley Cyrus’ Instagram Live show, Bright Minded.
“Recently I went to one of the best mental hospitals in America, McLean Hospital, and I discussed that, after years of going through a lot of different things, I realized that I was bipolar,” she said at the time. “And so when I go to know more information, it actually helps me. It doesn‘t scare me once I know it… I wanted to know everything about it, and it took the fear away.”
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Gomez also said that keeping off social media and the negativity that comes with it has helped quell her anxiety in recent years, admitting that she ceded her passwords to her assistant in 2017 and never looked back.
“I‘m like, ‘I’ve got to do something [more]. After I’m gone, I want people to remember me for my heart,’” she told ELLE. “This tiny little phone that had 150 million people on it – I just put it down. That was such a relief for me.”