In the series, which debuts Friday, May 21, on AppleTV+, Gaga fights back tears as she talks about going through hard times. “Everybody thinks you get sick and then get cured. It’s just not like that,” she says in the show’s first episode about the ups and down of mental illness. “I went through a really crazy time in my head…I had a total psychotic break, and for a couple years I was not the same girl.” She admits that even today, “the process of healing and my mental health has been a slow rise. Even if I have six brilliant months, all it takes is getting triggered once to feel bad.” Of course, The Me You Can’t See isn’t the first time Gaga has gone to some pretty dark places while sharing her mental health struggles; the 35-year-old has long engaged in frank discussions about her depression, anxiety, PTSD and self-harm, tracing those conditions back to the sexual assault and other traumas she’s endured. She’s also offered endless support to others suffering from similar afflictions, especially LGBTQ+ youth and victims of assault and abuse. Ahead of The Me You Can’t See’s premiere, let’s take a look at some of the most impactful things the A-list diva has said and done to combat the stigmas surrounding mental illness, both in the docuseries and beyond.
Lady Gaga started the Born This Way Foundation in 2012
Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation, which she launched alongside her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, is dedicated to fostering healthy conversations among teens about mental wellness and offering resources to those who need help. The group was started in part after 14-year-old Gaga megafan Jamey Rodemeyer committed suicide after being the victim of relentless homophobic bullying. Rodemeyer, who once filmed an “It Gets Better” video in support of other bullied LGBTQ+ teens, tweeted before taking his own life, “Bye mother monster, thank you for all you have done.” (Gaga’s fans are often called “Little Monsters,” a reference to her 2009 track “Monsters.”) In response to his death, Gaga tweeted, “Jamey Rodemeyer, 14 years old, took his life because of bullying. Bullying must become illegal. It is a hate crime.”
She first spoke with Oprah Winfrey about mental health in 2012
The Me You Can’t See won’t be the first time Gaga talks about her mental struggles with Winfrey. Back in 2012 on an episode of Oprah’s Next Chapter, Gaga and her mom talked about how the singer had suffered from bullying, with other kids once throwing her in a trash can and defacing her school locker with homophobic slurs. “Sometimes I feel worthless,” Gaga admitted. “When you experience the feeling of being picked up and thrown in the trash in public, something like that can really stay with you for life.”
Lady Gaga was raped at age 19
In 2014, Gaga was talking about how her song “Swine” dealt with the issue of rape when HowardStern asked whether she’d ever personally been a victim of rape herself. At first, Gaga replied, “I don’t want to…Let’s talk about happy things!” However, she soon admitted, “I went through some horrific things [and] I’ve gone through a lot of mental and physical therapy and emotional therapy to heal over the years…I don’t want to be defined by it.” In The Me You Can’t See, Gaga goes into greater detail about her rape, revealing that a music producer once asked her to take her clothes off; she said no, only to be subjected to repeated coercion from him. She also revealed that he got her pregnant and left her at her parents’ house. “First I felt full-on pain, then I went numb,” she says. “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.” Now, Gaga insists that—despite the progress made by the #MeToo movement—she doesn’t want to publicly identify her rapist because “I do not ever want to face that person again.” In fact, she says her M.O. for dealing with that painful memory is, “I dry my tears now and I move on," adding, “You can come back from things like that, but when it hits you really hard, it can change you.” Just a year after her stunning sexual assault confession, Gaga channeled her talents into the empowering anti-victimhood anthem “Til It Happens to You” for the documentary The Hunting Ground, about the widespread problem of sexual assault on college campuses. The song earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. She performed the track at the Academy Awards while sharing the stage with dozens of sexual assault survivors.
Lady Gaga suffers from depression, anxiety, PTSD and fibromyalgia
Gaga got frank about how much mental illness she’s had to contend with in a sitdown with Billboard. “I’ve suffered through depression and anxiety my entire life,” she told the outlet. “I still suffer with it every single day.” (The following year, she similarly told UK’s The Mirror, “I openly admit to having battled depression and anxiety and I think a lot of people do. I think it’s better when we all say: ‘Cheers!’ And ‘fess up to it.”) Gaga also credited fellow icon EltonJohn in her Billboard Q&A with helping to keep her mentally healthy. “He doesn’t allow me to slip into depression without making sure that I’m OK,” she explained. While speaking with a group of homeless LGBT youth in her native New York City, Gaga confessed something she’d never publicly revealed before. “I suffer from PTSD,” she said. She later shared in a letter posted to the Born This Way Foundation website, “There is a lot of shame attached to mental illness, but it’s important that you know that there is hope and a chance for recovery,” while also adding on Twitter that she was happy to have shared “one of my deepest secrets with the world” because “secrets keep you sick with shame.” The following year, Gaga would cancel part of her Joanne tour due to what she described at the time as “severe physical pain.” She also said on Instagram, “I have always been honest about my physical and mental health struggles. Searching for years to get to the bottom of them. It is complicated and difficult to explain, and we are trying to figure it out." Live Nation, her concert promoter, added in a statement that Gaga would take time to “work with her doctors to heal from this and past traumas that still affect her daily life.” Gaga would later be diagnosed with fibromyalgia stemming from her sexual assault. In The Me You Can’t See, Gaga linked the two by explaining, “The way that I feel after I feel pain was how I felt after I was raped…Your body remembers.” While promoting her Oscar-nominated movie A Star Is Born in 2018, Gaga guested on Stephen Colbert’s late-night talk show in the midst of Brett Kavanaugh’s contentious Supreme Court nomination hearings. When asked about the sexual assault allegations waged against Kavanaugh by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, Gaga gave an incredibly thoughtful response about the psychological effects of PTSD. “If someone is assaulted or experiences trauma, there is scientific proof [that] the brain changes,” she explained. “It takes the trauma and it puts it in a box and it files it away and shuts it so that we can survive the pain.”
Lady Gaga treats her conditions with antipsychotic prescription medications
In yet another one-on-one with Winfrey (this time as part of Winfrey’s 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus tour), Gaga got candid about how medications have benefitted her on her mental health journey. “Medication has helped me tremendously,” she explained. “I take an antipsychotic. [If I didn’t take it] I would spiral very frequently and I would spasm in my sleep.” She added, “A lot of people are afraid of medicine for their brains to help them. I really want to erase the stigma around this…so Gen Z does not have to deal with this the way we are right now. Mental health is a crisis."
Lady Gaga’s Chromatica album was inspired by her depression
Even after years of professional success and personal growth, Gaga continues to talk openly about how her mental health struggles persist. In September 2020, about four months after the arrival of her latest LP, Chromatica, she told PEOPLE magazine that before she cut the album, “I used to wake up in the morning, and I would realize I was ‘Lady Gaga.’ And then I became very depressed and sad, and I didn’t want to be myself…I spent a lot of time in a sort of catatonic state of just not wanting to do anything.” As always, though, music became her salvation: “And then I finally, slowly started to make music and tell my story through my record."
Lady Gaga reveals how she manages her mental health in The Me You Can’t See
In The Me You Can’t See, Gaga talks about everything from why she cut herself as a child to how she handles the psychological after-effects of being raped by a music producer at the age of 19. The good news is, Gaga has also learned “all the ways to pull myself out of it” when problematic feelings begin. For starters, “It is so important that you surround yourself with at least one person that validates you,” she says, “somebody that believes you, that cares about you and tells you that your pain matters and that it’s real.” She adds that she’s also learned to “regulate” herself through exercise, nutrition, therapy and other everyday habits that help ground her. Lastly, she recommends sharing your struggles as a way to help others. “I’m not here to tell my story for you because I want anybody to cry for me. I’m good,” she insists. “But open your heart for somebody else because I’m telling you, I’ve been through it and people need help.” Next, cheer up with these happy songs.
