Fans know Lady Gaga as a huge advocate of mental health. Time and again, she’s opened up about her mental health journey – including her struggles with depression and trauma. And she’s doing so once again.
The popstar joined Prince Harry and Oprah Winfrey on their new docuseries The Me You Can’t See – not as her larger-than-life persona Lady Gaga, but as herself, Stefani.
“I went through a really crazy time in my head that I still work on,” the music mogul says in the series. “And I’m trying to make sure that I give back with that experience instead of just, I don’t know, locking it away and faking it.”
During her segment, she talked about a past traumatic experience that led her to have a “total psychotic break” – which she was going through when she accepted her Oscar for A Star Is Born in 2019.
“I was 19 years old, and I was working in the business, and a producer said to me, ‘Take your clothes off,'” the Oscar winner recalled. “And I said no. And I left, and they told me they were going to burn all of my music. And they didn’t stop. They didn’t stop asking me, and I just froze and I—I don’t even remember.”
Gaga first revealed she’d been raped back in 2014 – but never named her assailant. And in the docuseries, she explains that she decided not to name the producer because she never wants to see him again, tearfully calling the industry “abusive” and “dangerous.”
Years later, Gaga went to the hospital to seek medical help for pain and numbness. To her surprise, a psychiatrist came to see her.
“First I felt full-on pain, then I went numb,” Gaga said. “And then I was sick for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks after, and I realized that it was the same pain that I felt when the person who raped me dropped me off pregnant on a corner. At my parents’ house because I was vomiting and sick. Because I’d been being abused. I was locked away in a studio for months.”
She does note that people can come back from similar traumatic experiences – she’s now able to talk about her past trauma and “move on.” However, the pain she endured changed her.
“I had a total psychotic break, and for a couple years, I was not the same girl,” she said. “The way that I feel when I feel pain was how I felt after I was raped. I’ve had so many MRIs and scans where they don’t find nothing. But your body remembers.”
“It’s a very real thing to feel like there’s a black cloud following you wherever you go and it’s telling you that you’re worthless and should die. I used to scream and throw myself against the wall… And you know why it’s not good to self-harm? Because it makes you feel worse,” she continues. “You think you’re gonna feel better ’cause you’re showing somebody, ‘Hey, look, I’m in pain.’ It doesn’t help. Tell somebody, don’t show somebody.”
Explaining how her path to healing has been a “slow rise” – it took her almost three years to “learn all the ways to pull myself out of it.” – Gaga admits she can still be triggered and pulled back into dark thoughts. But having those tools to help her reach a turning point. “It all started to slowly change.”
And she shares a message with the audience, “Everybody that’s at home right now that’s suffering, I would like to say that it’s so important that you surround yourself with at least one person who validates you…someone that believes you, that cares about you, and tells you that your pain matters and that it’s real.”
“Everybody thinks [healing] is a straight line, that it’s just like every other virus. That you get sick and then you get cured. But it’s not like that, it’s just not like that,” she adds.
If you or someone you know needs help, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
