Lady Gaga has revealed she is taking antipsychotic medication primarily used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The singer is taking olanzapine to help her cope with "mental issues" that leave her feeling "non-functional" and now she is opening up about it in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s Beats 1 radio station.
"I wrote a song on 'Chromatica' called '911,' and it’s about an antipsychotic that I take and it’s because I can’t always control things that my brain does and I have to take medication to stop the process that occurs," she said Tuesday via The Sun.
"I know I have mental issues and I know that they can sometimes render me non-functional as a human."
Lady Gaga previously revealed that she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from her rape at the age of 19 and has been vocal about how the incident impacted her mental health. Last year, in an interview with Oprah Winfrey for Elle, the "Poker Face" hitmaker recalled a "psychotic break" she had several years ago, which resulted in her being hospitalized.
"So I’m just screaming, and I said, 'Could somebody bring me a real doctor?' And I didn’t understand what was going on, because my whole body went numb; I fully dissociated. I was screaming, and then he calmed me down and gave me medication for when that happens —o lanzapine," she said.
"It helped me that day, and that man [her psychiatrist] and all my friends, they saved my life."
Speaking with Lowe, Lady Gaga admitted she initially did not want to release her album amid the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, she wanted to make a positive contribution to the world.
"I was like how can we do something more specific to help the world? How can I use my humanity to focus on something that I believe to be infinitely more important than what I've been through? Which is what the medical community has done," she said.
"It made me think about the helpers of the world and how their mental states are and how they don’t necessarily have the help that they need. When this is all ‘over’ whatever that means and things get ‘better’ whatever that means, who will be there to support them?"
She added: "I don’t lack self-awareness and I do understand I’m not the only human on the planet that suffers and I think I have it pretty f---ing good and I’m grateful for what I have."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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