Lady Gaga Opens Up About Her Mental Health Struggles And Medication
The 34-year-old pop star, Lady Gaga, opens up about her struggles with antipsychotic medicine, her “mental issues,” and past traumas.
The 'Bad Romance' singer explained on Oprah’s 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus that she went on medication to help deal with her mental health after developing PTSD from being raped multiple times as a teenager, which was never properly dealt with at the time.
The A Star is Born actress explained that she “can’t always control things that her brain does.”
The world-famous star, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, revealed this information while promoting her new album, Chromatica, with DJ Zane Lowe, which was released earlier this summer. Now, her comments on her medication are going quite viral.
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She told Lowe that the track '911' is about the medication, Olanzapine, which is a drug that is used to help treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
“I can’t always control things that my brain does — and I have to take medication to stop the process that occurs,” said Gaga while describing her psychological issues.
"I know I have mental issues and I know that they can sometimes render me non-functional as a human,” the 'Born This Way' singer added.
“It was one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me,” Gaga said. “I didn’t understand what was going on, because my whole body went numb; I fully dissociated. I was screaming, and then he her psychiatrist calmed me down and gave me medication for when that happens.”
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The 'Stupid Love' singer also revealed that she has a condition called fibromyalgia, which results in pain and cognitive problems.
“And then, I was triggered really bad in a court deposition, and this part of the brain where you stay centered and you don't dissociate, right? It went like this,” Gaga said, slamming her hand down to dramatically show what her brain felt like.
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“It slammed down. And my whole body started tingling, I started screaming,” the songwriter explained.
“It's very difficult to describe what it feels like other than that at first, you are completely tingling from head to toe, and then you go numb, but what is essentially happening is the brain goes, 'That's enough, I don't want to think about this anymore, I don't want to feel this anymore,' boom,” Gaga said.
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''Can you get me a real doctor?'' the New York City-born singer recalled to Oprah Winfrey. “He was like, 'Hey, so nice to meet you.' And he sat down and I was like, 'I need medicine, I don't feel well. I can't feel... help me.' And then he just said, 'I need you to explain to me what happened today.' And I was so annoyed,” said the pop sensation.
“But I'm telling you this story because even I, who run Born This Way Foundation with my mother, was irritated that they brought a psychiatrist in to help me. That's how gone I was.”
Gaga also spoke about her annoyance while speaking to the psychiatrist who wanted her to talk through what had just happened.
The 11-time Grammy winner revealed that she would “spiral very frequently” without her medication.
However, Gaga, with her daily doses combined with therapy, was able to get a better handle on her mental health condition.
“Medicine really helped me,” the record producer told Winfrey. “A lot of people are afraid of medicine for their brains to help them. I really want to erase the stigma around this.”