Lady Gaga reveals she is on antipsychotic medication
Pop superstar Lady Gaga has opened up about her fight to overcome challenging mental health issues, and why she wants to help medical workers through the coronavirus pandemic.
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Pop superstar Lady Gaga has revealed she is taking antipsychotic medication because she “can’t always control what [my] brain does”.
In a frank and revealing interview with British DJ Zane Lowe in the UK, Gaga said she was on medication normally used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
“I know I have mental issues and I know that they can sometimes render me non-functional as a human,” the superstar said.
“I wrote a song on [the album] Chromatica called 911, and it’s about an antipsychotic that I take and it’s because I can’t always control things that my brain does and I have to take medication to stop the process that occurs.”
Gaga’s battle with mental illness reportedly began as a teenager, she first revealed in an Oprah Winfrey interview last year. “I was raped when I was 19 [years] old, repeatedly,” said the singer, who reportedly suffers from fibromyalgia — a condition marked by widespread pain and cognitive problems — as a result.
Gaga said her symptoms became so severe at one point that she experienced a “psychotic break” that landed her in the emergency room.
“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.”
Fortunately, through daily doses of olanzapine combined with therapy, Gaga was able to stabilise her condition.
The 11-time Grammy winner said that without the medication, she would “spiral very frequently.”
“Medicine really helped me,” the singer 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.”
Meanwhile, Gaga said she has wanted to do more to help others amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“How can I use my humanity to focus on something that I believe to be infinitely more important than what I’ve been through? Which is what the medical community has done.
“It made me think about the helpers of the world and how their mental states are and how they don’t necessarily have the help that they need.
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“When this is all over whatever that means and things get better whatever that means, who will be there to support them,” she told Lowe.
“I don’t lack self awareness and I do understand I’m not the only human on the planet that suffers and I think I have it pretty f***ing good and I’m grateful for what I have.”
Originally published as Lady Gaga reveals she is on antipsychotic medication