Lady Gaga said she developed PTSD after being raped repeatedly when she was 19.
“I did not have anyone help me. I did not have a therapist. I did not have a psychiatrist. I did not have a doctor help me through it,” the pop star told Oprah Winfrey at an event in Fort Lauderdale on Saturday.
“I just all of a sudden became a star and was traveling the world, going from hotel room to garage to limo to stage, and I never dealt with it.”
Gaga, who did not identify the man who raped her, said without being able to process the trauma, she turned to self-harm. In an interview with Winfrey for the December issue of Elle, the singer opened up about being “a cutter.”
On Saturday, she shared: “I also used to throw myself against the wall. I used to do some horrible things to myself when I was in pain.”
Gaga acknowledged that harming herself was not a solution.
“You see the blood, and then you feel chaotic, and then you spiral more and more out of control,” she said. “It is actually not helpful in any way. It is going to make your spiral worse. It will make the neurotic state that you're in something that is going to be prolonged instead of shortening the amount of time that you're in it.”
Gaga also told Winfrey – and a crowd of about 15,000 people at the Oprah’s 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus tour stop – about a psychotic break she had.
“I was on the couch. I was laid out. I could not move,” she recalled. “I was being assessed by doctors to see if they could get me to move.
“They brought in a psychiatrist … Once we started talking, he realized what had happened to me, then he ordered medication for me that I took, reluctantly at first. He became my psychiatrist and assembled a team for me. I went away to a place that I go to sometimes still for a reboot. They took care of me, and we got all of the things lined up.”
Gaga said medication keeps her from spiralling.
“If I took my pillbox out, it would sound like a rattle,” she said. “But I'm healthier than I've ever been in my whole life.”
Gaga said she believes she was meant to go through all the trauma and pain she has experienced so she can help others.
“It's 2020, and over the next decade and maybe longer, I'm going to get the smartest scientists, doctors, psychiatrists, mathematicians, researchers and professors in the same room together,” she vowed, “and we are going to go through each problem one by one, and we are going to solve this mental health crisis.”
The “Born This Way” singer wants mental health to be part of every school’s curriculum.
“I want there to be someone in every school that someone can go to if they're in need of help, or that someone can go to if they see that someone else needs help,” said Gaga, adding that it should be "a requirement in every school that you learn about the importance of kindness, about triggers, and you learn about depression."
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