Selena Gomez Was Hearing Voices Before Psychotic Break, Bipolar Diagnosis

She spoke with the magazine ahead of the doc's release tomorrow, getting real about what she experienced before being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and sharing where she stands now.

"I'm going to be very open with everybody about this: I've been to four treatment centers," she told the publication. "I think when I started hitting my early twenties is when it started to get really dark, when I started to feel like I was not in control of what I was feeling, whether that was really great or really bad."

She explained that she would sometimes spend days in bed with depression and even contemplated suicide -- saying, "I thought the world would be better if I wasn't there" -- before swinging in the other direction, believing she needed to buy all her friends cars.

Gomez said her depression would be compounded by being single -- "I grew up thinking I would be married at 25. It wrecked me that I was nowhere near that" -- and feeling envious of other celebrities for how they were able to handle fame. "I never fit in with a cool group of girls that were celebrities. My only friend in the industry really is Taylor [Swift], so I remember feeling like I didn't belong," she added, saying she "just didn't like who I was, because I didn't know who I was."

She shared that in 2018 she started hearing voices that eventually, as Rolling Stone put it, "drowned out more and more of the real world," triggering a psychotic break. At the time she thought everyone was out to get her, stifled by paranoia and unrecognizable to her friends. It was then she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and put on a litany of medications that left her feeling just "gone." Following her release, she got a new psychiatrist who worked on reducing the meds.

"But I had to detox, essentially, from the medications I was on. I had to learn how to remember certain words. I would forget where I was when we were talking," she explained. "It took a lot of hard work for me to (a) accept that I was bipolar, but (b) learn how to deal with it because it wasn’t going to go away."

She shared that two of the drugs she takes make it so she likely won't be able to carry her own children in the future, something she said is "a very big, big, present thing in my life." She added that, "however I'm meant to have them, I will"

Gomez also revealed her positive outlook on her mental health situation.

"I remind myself that I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the psychotic break, if it wasn't for my lupus, if it wasn't for my diagnosis," she said. "I think I would just probably be another annoying entity that just wants to wear nice clothes all the time. I'm depressed thinking about who I would be."

"Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me" drops tomorrow on AppleTV+.