Movies

Selena Gomez documentary reveals suicidal ideation during 2016 tour

November 4, 2022

Selena Gomez’s new documentary “My Mind & Me” premiered on Apple TV+ on Friday.
The film shows Gomez spiraling into a mental health crisis during his “Revival” tour in 2016.
In a clip, Gomez’s former assistant says the singer had suicidal thoughts and her eyes were “black.”

“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 2016 “Revival” tour. During rehearsals and on the road, she is seen heading into a mental health crisis which led her to cancel the tour after 55 performances. .

“At one point she was like, ‘I don’t want to live right now. I don’t want to live,'” Gomez’s former assistant Theresa Marie Mingus said in an interview. “And I’m like, ‘Wait, what?'”

“It was one of those moments where you look her in the eye and there’s nothing there,” Mingus continued. “It was just black. And it’s so scary. You’re like, ‘OK, shit. This needs to stop. We need to go home.'”

Gomez’s close friend, Raquelle Stevens, also opened up about the confusion and pain she endured at the time.

“We must have had a very serious conversation with her, like, ‘What’s going on?’ His answer was also: “I don’t know. I can not explain it. I wish you could feel what it’s like to be in my head,” Stevens said of Gomez.

“I just remember it being very chaotic and her hearing all these voices,” Stevens continued. “They just kept getting louder and louder and louder. It triggered a sort of psychotic breakdown.”

Selena Gomez in an image from “My Mind & Me”.

AppleTV+

In 2017, Gomez underwent a life-saving kidney transplant she needed because of her lupus. A year later, she suffered further health complications which exacerbated her declining mental state. She was eventually taken to a mental hospital.

“If someone had seen what I saw, in the state she was in 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 found out about her “mental breakdown” via TMZ.

“I was afraid she was going to die,” Teefy said. “It’s a miracle she got out. But there’s always the fear of it happening again and it hurts us so much.”

In a voiceover, Gomez spoke about 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,” she said. “But I didn’t want to be trapped in myself anymore, in my mind. I thought my life was over. I was like, ‘This is what I will be forever.'”

Selena Gomez opens up about her bipolar diagnosis on ‘My Mind & Me’.

AppleTV+

Later in the documentary, while on a volunteer trip to Kenya in 2019, Gomez opens up to a local nursing student about her thoughts of self-harm.

She recently told Rolling Stone that she “never attempted suicide, but spent a few years thinking about it,” as editor Alex Morris paraphrased.

“I thought the world would be a better place if I wasn’t here,” Gomez told Morris.

“I remember I wouldn’t be here if not for the psychotic break, without my lupus, without my diagnosis,” she added later in the interview. “I think I’d probably be another boring entity that just wants to wear nice clothes all the time. I get depressed thinking about who I’ll be.”