Stars Who Have Opened Up About Being Diagnosed With Bipolar Disorder
“When I first got out, I didn’t know how I’d cope with my diagnosis,” Selena said of leaving a treatment center and being diagnosed in her 2022 documentary, My Mind & Me. “What if it happened again? What if the next time, I couldn’t come back? I needed to keep learning about it. I needed to take it day by day.”
“I am happier, and I’m in control of my emotions and thoughts more than I have ever been,” she said, adding that “connection” with others is the secret to her healing. “It helps me get out of my head,” she added.
She also revealed she found a psychiatrist who weaned her off some unnecessary medications.
“He really guided me, 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.”
She needed to remain on two medicines for her bipolar disorder. The medications mean it is “likely” she won’t be able to carry children of her own. Of this revelation, Selena shared, “that’s a very big, big, present thing in my life….however I’m meant to have them, I will.”
“I’m 30, and I’m going to go through moments in my life,” she continued. “I remind myself that I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the psychotic break, if it wasn’t for my lupus, if it wasn’t for my diagnosis. I think I would just probably be another annoying entity that just wants to wear nice clothes all the time. I’m depressed thinking about who I would be,” she told Rolling Stone.
“Until recently I lived in denial and isolation and in constant fear someone would expose me. It was too heavy a burden to carry and I simply couldn’t do that anymore. I sought and received treatment, I put positive people around me and I got back to doing what I love — writing songs and making music,” she told People in 2018.
“For a long time I thought I had a severe sleep disorder. But it wasn’t normal insomnia and I wasn’t lying awake counting sheep. I was working and working and working … I was irritable and in constant fear of letting people down. It turns out that I was experiencing a form of mania. Eventually I would just hit a wall. I guess my depressive episodes were characterized by having very low energy. I would feel so lonely and sad — even guilty that I wasn’t doing what I needed to be doing for my career.”
She added that she was first diagnosed in 2011 but “I didn’t want to believe it.” She added that she finally got treatment after “the hardest couple of years I’ve been through.”
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