Monday night, Demi Lovato shared words of experience and wisdom on Center for Youth Mental Health at NewYork-Presbyterian's annual benefit. The singer has rarely shied away from sharing the raw truths about her complicated journey with mental health, substance abuse and an eating disorder. In conversation with Dr. Charlie Shaffer, he shed light on the lessons he learned from entering inpatient treatment programs on five different occasions.
“I've been to inpatient treatment five times, and it's something that every time I went back to a treatment center, I felt defeated,” Lovato explained, per People. “And I know that experience firsthand, but I think the glimmer of hope was when I started working and started doing it, whether it was a job, or a program, or talking to my treatment team and building relationships there.”
He added: “I think the glimmer of hope started to change when I started finding the joy and the little things in life. And that was something that was so foreign to me before, because I was so used to, so used to not seeing hope.”
It took being accepted a fifth time for Lovato to realize she “definitely felt different” and credit herself for getting to that point in her journey. “I felt like I had hit rock bottom and I knew what I had to do, which was to live a life of recovery,” she said. “And that was something I put off for so long.”
Lovato has documented her hopeful recoveries and nasty accidents in several documentaries throughout her career, as well as in her music. In 2021 it was released Dancing with the Devil… the art of starting over with an accompanying documentary series, both following her recovery from a drug overdose in 2018. With that narrative so deeply intertwined with her high-profile life, Lovato had to learn how to separate her mental health from her identity her.
“It wasn't until I entered treatment for the first time that I realized that I am not who I am. It's just a part of what makes me, meaning my struggles have shaped me into the pottery you see today, but it's never been my identity since,” she shared. “There's been something about me that makes me a little interesting, I guess you could say… [I’m] grateful for the things I've been through and the things I've overcome.”
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