Selena Gomez’s press tour for her documentary My Mind and Me continued today with the release of a very thorough cover story for Rolling Stone, in which Gomez discusses everything: her secret struggle with psychosis, how her bipolar disorder diagnosis has changed her life (including her future plans to have children), why she moved to New York City, and how Hailey Bieber’s Call Your Daddy podcast interview, in which Hailey spoke about Gomez and her husband Justin Bieber’s romantic relationship for the first time, affected her.
“Somebody made a comment and it involved me, and then for two days I felt bad about myself,” she said, not referring to Hailey explicitly by name. She did add that in the past, this type of incident “could have set her back for months,” the outlet noted.
But Gomez spoke up a day after on TikTok Live, urging her fans to show kindness. “I was like, I’m just going to say, ‘Everybody be kind to each other. Everybody just focus on what’s going on in the real world,’” Gomez recalled. She and Hailey ultimately hung out and were photographed together at the Academy Museum Gala last month. Gomez told Vulture of the reunion and its signal to everyone that there’s peace between her and Hailey, “Yeah, it’s not a big deal. It’s not even a thing.”
Here, the highlights of what Gomez told Rolling Stone. You can read the piece in full here.
On what living with bipolar disorder has really been like for her:
“I’m going to be very open with everybody about this: I’ve been to four treatment centers. I think when I started hitting my early twenties is when it started to get really dark, when I started to feel like I was not in control of what I was feeling, whether that was really great or really bad.”
When she had low episodes: “It would start with depression, then it would go into isolation. Then it just was me not being able to move from my bed. I didn’t want anyone to talk to me. My friends would bring me food because they love me, but none of us knew what it was. Sometimes it was weeks I’d be in bed, to where even walking downstairs would get me out of breath.”
She admitted that she did spend a few years contemplating suicide although she never actually attempted it. “I thought the world would be better if I wasn’t there.”
On Taylor Swift being her only industry friend and struggling with fame:
(Gomez also spoke about Camila Cabello, Cara Delevingne, and Miley Cyrus being invited to her 30th birthday party, but Swift has long been a very close friend of hers.)
Gomez imagined a very different life for herself back in Texas. “I grew up thinking I would be married at 25,” she says. “It wrecked me that I was nowhere near that—couldn’t be farther from it. It was so stupid, but I really thought my world was over.”
She felt she had few people she could share her fears with, but she also struggled to relate to those in Hollywood. “I never fit in with a cool group of girls that were celebrities,” she said. “My only friend in the industry really is Taylor [Swift], so I remember feeling like I didn’t belong. I felt the presence of everyone around me living full lives. I had this position, and I was really happy, but … was I? Do these materialistic things make me happy? [I realized] I just didn’t like who I was, because I didn’t know who I was.”
On having an episode of psychosis in 2018 and getting diagnosed with bipolar disorder:
Gomez started hearing voices in 2018, and Rolling Stone reported that she “only remembers snippets of this time, but she knows she ended up in a treatment facility, where she spent several months suspended in paranoia, unable to trust anyone, thinking they were all out to get her. Her friends have since told her that she was unrecognizable during this period.”
One of the scariest things about psychosis was not knowing when it would end, Gomez said. She found herself slowly “walking out of psychosis,” she said. That was when she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was put on a lot of medication as doctors tried to find out what worked for her.
On all those drugs, “it was just that I was gone,” she said. “There was no part of me that was there anymore.” Once Gomez left the facility, she found a psychiatrist who “realized she was on a lot of medications she shouldn’t have been on and pulled her off all but two,” Rolling Stone wrote.
“He really guided me,” Gomez said. “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.”
Regarding her donated kidney potentially having a limited shelf life and how her medications may affect her plans to have kids someday, Gomez told Rolling Stone that the organ may only last for 30 years. “Which is fine,” she said. “I might be like, ‘Peace out,’ anyway.”
She also revealed that her need to remain on two drugs she takes to manage her bipolar disorder means “she likely won’t be able to carry her own children,” the outlet wrote. “That’s a very big, big, present thing in my life [her hope to be a mother someday],” she said, adding that she believes “however I’m meant to have them, I will.”
On why she moved to New York City and her plans to “disappear” after documentary promo:
Gomez likes that New York is a place where people will just leave her alone more. “I have people literally say to me, ‘Stop saying you don’t like L.A.,’” she said. “But if I’m honest, my schedule in New York is the crème de la crème. I have my system there, I have my workouts there, I have my coffee spots there. I get to walk and breathe there, and be inspired by New York City and the people and the life there.”
“I like all the slush and grossness,” she added of the New York winters. “I love being near all the Jewish grandmas. Nothing compares to being in your home in a blanket by the fireplace just reading or watching something.”
Gomez added that she plans to disappear once her documentary promotion is done. “This is probably the most you’ll hear about me for a while. I want this to come out, but I also want this behind me. Every now and then it’s important to just disappear.”
Alyssa Bailey is the senior news and strategy editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage of celebrities and royals (particularly Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton). She previously held positions at InStyle and Cosmopolitan. When she’s not working, she loves running around Central Park, making people take #ootd pics of her, and exploring New York City.
