‘I think about dying’: how Lady Gaga got her mental health scars
The line between feeling okay and wanting to cut yourself, says Lady Gaga, is a very narrow one. In fact, even though she says she’s not sure how to articulate her point, lest she inadvertently make it seem like something to try, she admits it’s something she’s done to herself relatively recently. “All it takes is getting triggered once to feel bad,” she says. “And when I say feel bad, I mean want to cut, think about dying, wondering if I’m ever gonna do it.”
Talking as part of The Me You Can’t See, the new Apple TV series in which producers Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry take a deeply personal and frequently raw look at mental health, her words – credited to her real name Stefani, rather than her stage persona – are as revealing as any from those interviewed. Elsewhere in its debut episode, released today, Harry himself discusses the impact having to publicly work through the death of his mother, Princess Diana, when he was just 12 years old had on him, calling his “a puzzling life”, while celebrity chef Rashad Armstead tells of how getting from one end of the day to the other can be a challenge without hiding what’s going on.
Gaga’s point is an important one for more than just its stark confession: what’s often overlooked is that maintaining good mental health is an ongoing thing. There’s no ‘cure’ for things like depression and trauma and anxiety – that’s not how they work. Rather, it’s about understanding and living with it, knowing how to respond. “People think you’re sick then you’re cured, and that traps people,” she says. “You get so frustrated – I got frustrated going, ‘why am I not getting better? What’s wrong with me?’”
For her, a major traumatic point she identifies – one she has spoken about before – is a period of sexual abuse at the hands of a producer she declines to name on account of never wanting to have to deal with him ever again. When she was 19 years old, two years before Just Dance made her into one of the world’s biggest new stars almost overnight, she says he ordered her to take her clothes off.
When she refused, he kept the pressure on. Eventually, he raped her. This, she says, has resulted in a PTSD response, where the same feeling as in the aftermath of being attacked comes over her body. When she broke big and life suddenly became a high-intensity schedule of “traveling the world going from hotel room to garage to limo to stage,” self-care time was at a premium. Enough time to process such a traumatic experience more so. The result was a physical toll on her body that manifested itself in near-constant pain, eventually diagnosed as fibromyalgia – although she’s said it’s brought on by the body almost mimicking pain, even when there’s no physical harm being done.
“I did not have anyone help me,” she told Oprah in a separate interview last year. “I did not have a therapist. I did not have a psychiatrist. I did not have a doctor help me through it. I never dealt with it. And then all of a sudden, I started to experience this incredible, intense pain throughout my entire body that mimicked, actually, the illness that I felt after I was raped. I was raped by someone that I knew – repeatedly - and it was a trauma response.”
This isn’t the first time Gaga has opened up like this. She has a long history of being candidly open in discussing mental health, often in a manner far more vulnerable than a star with currency as high as hers might normally do. Her 2017 documentary Five Foot Two gives an intentional peep at the real woman behind the meat dress, at the stress and strain of the rarefied air, where moments of pure joy are shown alongside tearful worries about being alone.
In 2014, following the release of Artpop – a record she recently described as being, “like heart surgery, I was desperate, in pain” – she told Harpers Bazaar, “I became very depressed at the end of 2013. I was exhausted fighting people off. I couldn’t even feel my own heartbeat. I was angry, cynical and had this deep sadness like an anchor dragging everywhere I go. I just didn’t feel like fighting anymore.”
At other times, she has opened up about episodes of dissociation, about medication, about anxiety, self-doubt and being unsure that “I wasn’t good enough”, as she put it in Five Foot Two. In the film, the stripping back of her flamboyant persona in favour of presenting her more human side for 2016’s Joanna is shown as a deliberate way to get back something more ‘normal’. More recently, ahead of the release of last year’s Chromatica, she confessed how heavy the crown of being one of the most iconic artists of her generation had become. "I used to wake up every day and remember I was Lady Gaga, and then I would get depressed," she said in an interview with Billboard. "My existence in and of itself was a threat to me. I thought about really dark sh-t every single day."
Where she’d created the character of Lady Gaga as an idea – “a superhero” who “made [me] feel confident and compassionate”, as she put it to Oprah – she’d found herself at a point where she’d come to resent her beloved piano on which she’d write songs. “You ruined my life,” she’d tell it. “You made me Lady Gaga.”
“Honestly, I just totally gave up on myself. I hated being famous, I hated being a star,” she told CBS’ Lee Cowan. “I felt exhausted and used up.” When Cowan asked if this had led to thoughts of suicide, she admitted, “Oh yeah, every day. I didn't really understand why I should live, other than to be there for my family. That was an actual real thought and feeling – why should I stick around?"
The unvarnished honesty of this admission is not only incredibly brave for a person to show to the entire world, but also all-too relatable for many. Though she admits to often having had trouble with those around her reaching out because, “'I'm Lady Gaga, you don't understand what it feels like,” you don’t have to be Lady Gaga to have ever found the question of ‘What’s the point?’ refusing to leave you alone.
As someone who’s constantly championed those on the outside, it’s unsurprising that Gaga has often brought these things to the fore in her music. The defiant Swine from Artpop deals with her assault, telling Howard Stern in 2014 that it’s “about rage and fury and passion… I had a lot of pain that I wanted to release.” On Chromatica, beneath its thrilling, futuristic disco sound, Rain On Me is about tears, and about drinking to numb yourself. The song 911, meanwhile, is about the anti-psychotic drug Olanzapine, which she is prescribed. Crucially, though, in both, there is a search for strength and finding one’s rhythm in the world that makes them a celebration of spirit.
“Even with that much rain, you don’t have to drown,” she told Zane Lowe of Rain On Me. “Even though it feels like you are, you can still swim. And if there’s a strong current with a bunch of waves and they keep crashing over you, if you keep swimming, you’ll reach the centre of the ocean, where it’s calm, still, and peaceful.”
Explaining the colourful, trippy video for 911, in which she’s caught in a psychedelic desert, she told fans on Instagram, “This short film is very personal to me, my experience with mental health and the way reality and dreams can interconnect to form heroes within us and all around us. “I’m awake now, I can see you, I can feel you, thank you for believing in me when I was very afraid. Something that was once my real life everyday is now a film, a true story that is now the past and not the present. It’s the poetry of pain.”
But still, part of the problem for any star laying these kinds of cards on the table is that the reaction is often one of a cynical, ‘poor me’ variety. When Metallica had to cancel their appearance at the Sonic Temple festival in Ohio last May, owing to frontman James Hetfield’s ongoing alcohol rehab treatment requiring him to be elsewhere on that date, the news was met with derision. Never mind that the deaths of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington and The Prodigy’s Keith Flint – all men who apparently had nothing to complain about when they took their own lives – were still being felt. Never mind that here was one of their contemporaries doing what so many had wished they had done, holding up his hands and getting help. We’ve paid for our tickets, more than enough people to be a problem said, what’s a millionaire rock star got to worry about?
This was something Zane Lowe put to Gaga in 2016, asking about her break ahead of Joanne. The world is yours, he reasoned: what happened? “Paranoia, fear, alcohol, drugs, anxiety, body pain,” she replied. All things that might sound familiar to anyone, things that success and fame and money can’t always shut out. Beneath the glittering pop-star-from-outer-space onstage identity, she’s just as normal and human as anyone else.
Perhaps, then, it’s Lady Gaga’s willingness to be so open, and to have done things like cancel gigs and tours in order to look after herself, that have given her more of a degree of control over these situations than other huge stars. Perhaps it’s why it’s become an accepted part of her fame, and has been treated with a great deal more respect than Britney Spears was before her. It’s also part of why her fans, The Little Monsters, love her in the way they do – the star who won an Oscar and sang at Joe Biden’s inauguration and arrived onstage at Twickenham Stadium on horseback isn’t so different from the rest of us.
The other thing she’s done is look for pragmatic approached to living with these issues and shared what she’s learned. Acknowledging that she’s in the privileged position to have a lot of money and a big support network on her side where others don’t, one massive thing she’s done is to start the Born This Way Foundation with her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, an organisation that works with young people to help promote better mental health awareness. They plan to achieve their goal, “Through high impact programming, youth led conversations and strategic, cross-sectoral partnerships… to make kindness cool, validate the emotions of young people, and eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health”. As she says, it’s not something to be ‘cured’, but understood and lived with, as she knows only too well.
“I have radically accepted that I will put my shame in a box all the way over there and make it very small,” she said to Oprah last year. “And I say to myself, ‘I have mental health issues. I take a lot of medication to stay on board. And I'm a survivor. And I'm living and I'm thriving and I'm strong and I'm gonna take all my life experiences and I'm gonna share them with the world and make it a better place.’ I want to help people.”
“These people that come to my shows, I don't want to just take your money and sing for you - I want to help change your life.”
Samaritans is available round the clock, every single day of the year, providing a safe place for anyone who is struggling to cope. Please call 116 123, email [email protected], or visit www.samaritans.org to find details of the nearest branch
