Demi Lovato has been an open book when it comes to her struggles with mental health. The 31-year-old singer spoke about the hard work of finding balance during a chat with Dr. Charlie Shaffer on Monday night at the Center for Youth Mental Health at New York Presbyterian’s annual benefit according to People.
“I have been to inpatient treatment five times, and it has something that every single time I walked back into a treatment center, I felt defeated,” Lovato said. “And I know that experience firsthand, but I think the glimmer of hope was when I started putting in the work and I started to, whether it was work, a program, or talk to my treatment team and build relationships there.”
Lovato said she began to get a “glimmer of hope” when she started to find joy in the little things in life, an experience that used to be foreign to her because, she said, she was so used to “not seeing hope…. It felt like I had hit rock bottom and I just knew what I needed to do, which was to live a life in recovery. And that was something that I pushed off for so long,” she added, referring to her fifth trip to in-patient mental health treatement.
Another key, she added, was finally finding the right mix of medication, which Lovato said “helped me tremendously… And I think I had hit another low, and I was like, ‘what am I doing wrong?’ I felt defeated. But then, when all of the key parts started to fit into place like a perfect puzzle, I started to find the light again.” The singer/actress also said that her treatment taught her that her mental health is not her “identity.”
In 2011, Lovato, then 18, revealed in an interview with Robin Roberts that she’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Then, in her 2021 docuseries Dancing With the Devil, she revealed that she’d been misdiagnosed.
“It wasn’t until I went into treatment for the first time that I realized this isn’t who I am,” she said at Monday’s event. “It’s just a part of what makes me me, meaning my struggles have shaped me into the pottery that you see today, but it’s never become my identity since then. It’s just become something about me that makes me a little interesting, I guess you could say.” That said, as difficult as it’s been, Lovato said she’s grateful for what she’s been through and what she’s overcome.
