Lady Gaga has been blessing us with her artistry and fashion for years now, but it’s her new self-discovery that has our attention these days. Although her music is still toping the charts and taking over dance floors, her determination to tackle mental health issues has the world looking.
Gaga sat down with Oprah Winfrey in front of 15,000 people in Fort Lauderdale at the first stop of Oprah’s 2020 Vision Tour. The tours agenda is to hit arenas across America to inspire attendees to pursue a more holistic lifestyle. During the interview Gaga opened up about her struggles with mental health, her secret to healing and the future of her Born This Way Foundation.
Before Gaga could set out to help other with their mental health challenges she had to first face her own causes of pain and suffering. “I was raped repeatedly when I was 19 years old” she said “I also developed PTSD as a result of being raped and not processing that trauma. 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.” As a result, Gaga had a psychotic break down and was diagnosed with a condition called fibromyalgia which leaves her in constant pain from head-to toe due to trauma response. The only way to heal the pain was to accept it, “I remember sitting with my doctor… his name’s Andy, and Andy’s like ‘you need to radically accept that you’re going to be in pain everyday’. I was like ‘Are you kidding me? That’s how I’m going to heal, just by accepting that I’m going to feel awful all the time?’ With a regimen of medication, meditation, therapy and exercise the pain became manageable and all of a sudden, I could function,” she said.
Her struggle with depression and fibromyalgia has opened her eyes to understand her own pain and suffering and how to heal it. Now she’s on a mission to share that awareness and knowledge with the world. She believes that she experienced pain so that she could help others. “I was supposed to go through this, even the rape, all of it,” she said. “I think it happened because god was saying to me, “I’m going to show you pain, and then you’re going to help other people who are in pain, because you’re going to understand it.” Gaga then made an Oath to everyone in attendance to use all of her resources to solve mental health issues “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. 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 Foundation has already helped put mental health first aid in schools across the country, and Gaga is committed to getting more schools access to that help as much as she can. “I want mental health to be its own class,” she said. “What is health class, sex ed? Is that what we’re still doing? We should be learning about the brain and the heart, and the mind and the body and its connection and all the things. 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. At the same time, it should be a requirement in every school that you learn about the importance of kindness, about triggers, and you learn about depression.
We wish Lady Gaga the best as she continues to heal herself and others suffering from mental health issues.
