Lady Gaga Reveals She Suffered Psychotic Break After Rape: 'I Was A Cutter'
Nov. 6 2019, Published 5:10 p.m. ET
Lady Gaga reveals she suffered a psychotic break and cut herself after being raped.
In a shocking new Elle interview, the singer/actress, 33, said she was rushed to the hospital.
“I was brought to the ER to urgent care and they brought in the doctor, a psychiatrist. 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,” she said.
The psychotic break was “one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me,” Gaga recalled.
In 2014, Gaga first spoke publicly about being raped at the age of 19.
Two years later, she said she's been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) ever since the attack.
In 2017, the A Star is Born actress postponed a world tour due to a physical condition.
She wrote on social media at that time, “I have always been honest about my physical and mental health struggles. Searching for years to get to the bottom of them. It is complicated and difficult to explain, and we are trying to figure it out.”
In her new interview, Gaga said the psychotic break happened as the result of her rape trauma and her fibromyalgia, a chronic condition that causes muscle pain, fatigue and memory problems.
“Although there are many different theories about fibromyalgia — for me, my fibromyalgia and my trauma response kind of go hand in hand,” she said. “The fibro for me is a lighter pain; the trauma response is much heavier and actually feels the way I felt after I was dropped on a street corner after I’d been raped repeatedly for months. It’s a recurring feeling.”
Gaga said she started taking an antipsychotic medication used to treat mental disorders after her break.
“I was screaming, and then the doctor calmed me down and gave me medication for when that happens — olanzapine. So I take methocarbamol, and olanzapine, which is probably the most important — it helped me that day, and that man and all my friends, they saved my life,” she said.
Dialectical behavioral therapy has also helped Gaga, and she said she has a teacher. "I think that DBT is a wonderful, wonderful way to deal with mental health issues.”
DBT, an intensive type of therapy, is also used to treat her cutting problem.
Gaga noted, “I’ve actually not opened up very much about this, but I think it’s an important thing for people to know and hear: I was a cutter for a long time, and the only way that I was able to stop cutting and self-harming myself was to realize that what I was doing was trying to show people that I was in pain instead of telling them and asking for help. When I realized that telling someone, ‘Hey, I am having an urge to hurt myself,’ that defused it.”
The "Bad Romance" singer recently broke up with her boyfriend, sound engineer Dan Horton.
She's said of cutting, “I’m very grateful that I don’t do it anymore, and I wish to not glamorize it. One thing that I would suggest to people who struggle with trauma response or self-harm issues or suicidal ideation is actually ice. If you put your hands in a bowl of ice-cold water, it shocks the nervous system, and it brings you back to reality.”