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“Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me” pulls back the curtain on the singer’s “psychotic break” that landed her in the hospital in 2018.
The new Apple TV+ documentary, which premiered Friday, opens with footage from Gomez’s “Revival” tour in 2016. During rehearsals and while on the road, she’s shown moving toward a mental health crisis that led her to cancel the tour after 55 shows.
“At some point, he says, ‘I don’t want to be alive right now. I don’t want to live,” Gomez’s former assistant Theresa Marie Mingus said during an interview clip. “And I’m like, ‘Wait, what?’
“It was one of those moments where you look into her eyes and there’s nothing there,” Mingus continued. “It was almost pitch black. And it’s so scary. You’re like, ‘Okay, screw this.’ It has to end. We have to go home.”
Gomez’s close friend Raquel Stevens also spoke of the confusion and pain she endured at the time.
“We had to have a very serious conversation with her, like, ‘What’s going on?’ Her response was also, “I don’t know. I can’t explain it. I wish you could feel what it’s like to be in my head,” Stevens said of Gomez.
“I remember it being very chaotic and hearing all these voices,” Stevens continued. “They just kept getting louder and louder. That triggered some sort of psychotic break.”
Selena Gomez in a still from ‘My Mind & Me’. Apple TV+
In 2017, Gomez underwent a life-saving kidney transplant needed as a result of her lupus. A year later, she suffered more health complications that worsened her declining mental state. He was eventually transferred to a psychiatric hospital.
“If anyone saw what I saw, in the condition she was in the mental hospital, they wouldn’t have recognized her at all,” Stevens said of Gomez.
The superstar’s mother, Mandy Teefy, added that Gomez’s family learned of her “mental breakdown” through TMZ.
“I was afraid he was going to die,” Tiffy said. “It’s a miracle it got out. But there’s always the fear that this will happen again and it hurt us so much.”
In a voiceover, Gomez reflected on her experience at the facility, where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
“I’ll be honest, I didn’t want to go to a mental hospital,” he said. “But I didn’t want to be trapped in myself, in my mind anymore. I thought my life was over. I was like, ‘This is who I’m going to be forever.’
Selena Gomez reflects on her bipolar diagnosis in ‘My Mind & Me’. Apple TV+
Later in the documentary, during a volunteer trip to Kenya in 2019, Gomez is shown opening up to a local nursing student about having thoughts of self-harm.
He recently told Rolling Stone that he “never actually attempted suicide, but spent a few years thinking about it,” as paraphrased by editor Alex Morris.
“I thought the world would be better off if I wasn’t there,” Gomez told Morris.
“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 later added in the interview. “I think I’d probably be another annoying entity who just wants to wear nice clothes all the time. I’m depressed thinking about who I’m going to be.”
