Selena Gomez Opens Up About Mental Health Struggles
Selena Gomez has been open about her mental health struggles in the past and now she’s sharing more details about that time in Elle’s first-ever Latinx issue
Photo: Elle/Inez & Vinoodh
Selena Gomez has been open about her mental health struggles in the past and now she’s sharing more details about that time in Elle’s first-ever Latinx issue. Following her 2014 diagnosis of Lupus (an autoimmune disease) and 2018 diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and the release of Rare in 2020, her first album since the mega-successful Revival in 2015, she’s been discussing the struggles she’s been dealing with. She shares one thing she changed was deleting social media apps from her phone because, like most of us, she found that interacting with social media was time consuming and distracting. The 29-year-old singer has 253 million Instagram followers and is one of the top ten celebs with the most followers on the platform but in 2016 she was the most followed person on Instagram and it’s evident that took its toll on her.
“I’m like, ‘I’ve got to do something [more]. After I’m gone, I want people to remember me for my heart,'” she said of her 2017 decision to cut out social media apps. “… I suddenly had to learn how to be with myself. That was annoying, because in the past, I could spend hours looking at other people’s lives. I would find myself down nearly two years in someone’s feed, and then I’d realize, ‘I don’t even know this person!'”
She explained that she went from being caught up in social media posts to deciding to help people and interacting on a more personal level versus digital platforms. Through her Rare Beauty line, which launched in 2020, she made sure there would be a charitable component with the establishment of the Rare Impact Fund which goes toward mental health services. She also premiered the HBO Max series, Selena + Chef, which features her cooking with renowned chefs including Angelo Sosa, Antonia Lofaso, and Nancy Silverton. In the profile it states the show maker her happy and that her fans have responded positively to the fact that she’s authentic, showing that she’s not the best cook but doing it anyway. The show also has a philanthropic element having raised $360,000 for 23 nonprofit organizations during just the first two seasons. She said “It’s the most ‘myself ’ I’ve been to the world.”
“Everything that I’m attached to has a charity aspect,” she says. “If something good isn’t coming out of it, I’m not going to do it. I don’t need money. I need people who want to fight with me.”
Gomez is set to star in the upcoming biopic about Peruvian-American Silvia Vásquez-Lavado, a record-breaking, lesbian mountaineer who was the first openly gay woman to complete the Seven Summits. In March of this year she released her first ever Spanish-language album Revelación. So her work is now leaning more toward her Latin roots and she shared that she worked with a Spanish coach as she worked on the album.
“I made sure that I didn’t look like a fool,” she said. “I focused so hard on making sure that the language I was speaking, and the way I was speak-ing it, was authentic. I wanted it to exude love—to talk about pain, but in a way that was confident. There is a song about girls saying goodbye to things that aren’t good for us.”
