“Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me” highlights the singer-actress’s battle with anxiety and depression during her 2016 “Revival” tour.
After what her team thought was a stellar rehearsal before one of her shows, Gomez broke down in tears due to her lack of confidence in her performance.
“I get the voice that comes into my head that says, ‘You missed that,'” she told her team in her documentary on AppleTV+.
Coupled with being on surveillance for her lupus and being bombarded by paparazzi asking about her ex-boyfriend Justin Bieber and his relationship with alcohol, Gomez’s mental health became too much for her to handle.
She canceled her tour after 55 performances.
Shortly after, she checked herself into a mental health facility and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. “I thought my life was over. I was like, ‘This is how I’m gonna be forever,'” she said.
But, with the support of her family and friends, Gomez was able to get to a place where she could see her diagnosis as the start of getting her life back on track.
“The more you know, the less you’ll be afraid of it,” she said.
And finally, she found something that made mental resilience so much easier: service.
“Service is one of the best antidotes to loneliness”
Three years after canceling her tour, Gomez visited two schools she helped fund in Kenya with WE Charity. There, she met several students with touching stories that marked her forever.
Yet it was when she resumed her press tour for her new album, ‘Rare’, that she was able to realize how much giving to others fueled her – and how much not doing so was draining her. .
“I knew what made me happy was the connection,” she said.
And her understanding of the service’s ability to bolster her mental health was only heightened when she interviewed Vivek Murthy, US Surgeon General, for her 2020 Mental Health Social Summit.
“It turns out that service is one of the greatest antidotes to loneliness we have. We reaffirm to ourselves that we have value to bring to the world,” Murthy told Gomez.
“Simply by being fully present and listening to someone, we can give them something extraordinarily powerful.”
That same year, Gomez created the Rare Impact Fund to raise $100 million to provide free mental health resources to young people.
Reflecting on the psychosis she went through in 2016, she said, “I think I needed to go through that to be who I am. And I’m going to keep going through that, but I’m really happy.”
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