Lady Gaga Opens Up About Sexual Assault And Mental Health: ”I Have Mental Health Issues, I Take A Lot of Medicine to Stay on Board”

Pop superstar Lady Gaga sat down with Oprah Winfrey and opened up about taking medication,  her mental health issues, and sexual assault on Winfrey’s 2020 wellness tour in Florida.

In front of a packed theater full of 15,000 people, Gaga spoke candidly about how she maintains mental health.

“I will put my shame in a box all the way over there and make it very small and say to myself, ‘I have mental health issues, I take a lot of medicine to stay on board, and I’m a survivor, and I’m living, and I’m thriving, and I’m strong, and I’m going to take all my life experiences, and I’m going to share them with the world and make it a better place,'” she said on stage at the BB&T Center in Sunrise, Florida.

According to CBS News, Florida was the first stop on Winfrey’s “2020 Vision: Your Life In Focus” tour. The Entertainment Guru partnered with WW Reimagined (formerly known as Weight Watchers) for the wellness tour.

Gaga got real with the Winfrey and audience and told them, “I take no narcotics at all. No pain medication,” she admitted. “I’m on antidepressants.”

The Grammy and Oscar Award-winning singer also revealed she suffered from PSTD and self-harm as a result of being raped by someone she knew growing up.

“I was raped repeatedly when I was 19 years old, and I also developed PTSD as a result of being raped and also not processing that trauma,” she told Oprah.

Gaga confessed that her meteoric rise to stardom served as a distraction that helped her avoid dealing with her trauma.

“I 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, and then all of a sudden I started to experience this incredible intense pain throughout my entire body that mimicked the illness I felt after I was raped,” she told Oprah. Gaga later said there should be mental health classes in schools, the publication reports.

She also divulged that she’s battling fibromyalgia, telling Oprah that she was in “head to toe pain” during their conversation.

“I remember sitting with my doctor,” she said. “His name’s Andy, and Andy’s like, ‘You need to radically accept that you’re going to be in pain every day.’ I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? That’s how I’m going to heal, just by accepting that I going to feel awful all the time?'”

The singer claimed that with a regimen of medication, meditation, therapy, and exercise the chronic pain has lessened and become more manageable.

Oprah’s 2020 Vision tour is set to feature conversations with Jennifer Lopez and Michelle Obama, ending with Gayle King on March 7th in Denver, CO. The interviews will be posted on both her Facebook channel and the WW Now Facebook channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da3iA6-9jWc