In an effort to help others, Demi Lovato has been candid about substance use, suicidal thoughts, bipolar disorder and disordered eating — and how, despite her struggles with co-occurring disorders, she’s found happiness, hope and purpose.
With her wire-rimmed round glasses, long brown hair and gap-toothed grin, Lovato, 32, skipped, giggled, and danced beside a purple dinosaur on the popular kids show Barney & Friends at just 8 years old. But even though she was publicly singing about counting kittens and learning shapes on the PBS program, she was secretly thinking about dying by suicide.
Next came Disney-star fame with roles in As the Bell Rings, Sonny with a Chance and the Camp Rock movie franchise, where she got the chance to sing to an even bigger crowd of fans and found herself juggling professional and social pressures that led to her using substances to cope.
In and out of at least five rehabilitation programs — “Every single time I walked back into a treatment center, I felt defeated,” Lovato said in a conversation with Dr. Charlie Shaffer at NewYork-Presbyterian’s Center for Youth Mental Health in June 2024 — Lovato has poured her pain into performances and song lyrics.
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Open about being sober for a six-year stint, she was just as open about going back to substance use and misuse in her 2018 song “Sober”: “I got no excuses for all of these goodbyes /Wake me when the shakes are gone and the cold sweats disappear /Momma, I’m so sorry / I’m not sober anymore and daddy / please, forgive me for the drinks spilled on the floor / To the ones who never left me / we’ve been down this road before.” And on July 24, 2018, Lovato overdosed on a mixture of opioid drugs, heroin, and fentanyl, and suffered strokes and a heart attack, she revealed in the 2021 YouTube docuseries Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil. “The doctors told me that I had five to 10 minutes,” she said during a March 2021 interview on CBS Sunday Morning. “Like, if no one had found me, then I wouldn’t be here. And I’m grateful that I’m sitting here today.”
The singer and songwriter, who directed the 2024 Hulu documentary Child Star, which explored through interviews and stories the experiences of other kids who entered show business at an early age, is currently engaged to Canadian musician Jutes (born Jordan Lutes) and continues speaking out about her co-occurring disorders and continuing journey through it. “Love is the greatest gift that we can receive in this lifetime,” Lovato told the Today show in February 2024. “Being able to find love has been so rewarding and definitely makes all of the hardships that I’ve been through and heartbreaks seem worth it.”
She said, “I feel happier than I’ve ever been. I am in such a great place.”
Struggles Started Early
“The first time that I dealt with depression was around seven years old,” Lovato said during an October 10, 2024, panel for the World Mental Health Day Festival in New York. “That was the age that I first had suicidal ideations at.”
By seventh grade, she had left public school after being bullied by her classmates, who wrote a letter saying Lovato should “kill herself,” she recalled in a September 2024 interview with Teen Vogue. “And they passed it around the school and people signed it,” she said. “And so, whether they intended it to be or not, it turned out to be like a suicide petition. It was a really dark time for me. It threw me into a spiral and it traumatized me and I still deal with that today… I feel like I’ve done a lot of work around it.”
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The bullying she received in seventh grade haunted her and she felt like an outcast even after she left middle school, she revealed in her 2017 YouTube documentary Simply Complicated. As she was trying to find ways to cope with the feelings of isolation and pain, she sought out a popular girl who was surrounded by friends and who “partied,” and began misusing alcohol.
By 2009, Lovato was on the Disney Channel and a couple of friends offered her cocaine. “I was scared, because my mom always told me your heart could just burst if you do it, but I did it anyways,” she said in the documentary. “And I loved it.” Hiding her anguish with alcohol misuse and substance use became a part of her daily routine.
She told Access Hollywood in 2013, “I couldn’t go 30 minutes to an hour without cocaine, and I would bring it on airplanes. I would smuggle it basically and just wait until everyone in first class would go to sleep, and I would do it right there. I’d sneak to the bathroom, and I’d do it.”
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Learning About Bipolar Disorder — and Treating It
After going into a treatment facility, “at 18, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder,” she told Extra in 2016. “The biggest misconception when it comes to bipolar disorder is that you’re fine one minute and then you’re not fine the next minute. And people often throw the word ‘bipolar’ around very often in situations that don’t relate to bipolar at all.” She said she wanted to do more to help change the negative stigma: “For me, [bipolar disorder] represents something that I have, it doesn’t represent who I am.”
Understanding more about the disorder brought her a measure of peace. “There were so many sleepless nights, so many tears, and I didn’t know why I was feeling that way,” Lovato said at the World Mental Health Day Festival in 2024. “When I got the diagnosis, there was a sense of relief that came with it, because I thought, ‘I can put a name to this, and this is why.’”
And she says that finding the right medication has also been key. “Medication is something that has worked wonders for me, especially being bipolar,” she told Teen Vogue. “When I first became an advocate for my mental health and other people’s mental health journey, I realized that sometimes it takes 10 years to get a diagnosis, the right diagnosis. And then…you [have to find] the right medication for you, which can take…weeks, months, years at a time.
She went on: “I struggled for so many years with bipolar disorder before I realized that’s what it was. [I’d have] bouts of mania where I would be up until six, seven in the morning just writing 10 songs a night. I liked it for my creativity, but it wasn’t something that provided a stable lifestyle for me.”
In 2021, she told Women’s Health that since finding more healthy ways to manage her diagnosis, without relying on substance misuse, she wanted women to know “it’s possible to live well, feel well, and also find happiness with bipolar disorder or any other mental illness they’re struggling with.”
Multiple Rehabilitation Facilities – and Struggles With Disordered Eating
From 2010 through 2016, Lovato revealed in Simply Complicated, she went into treatment and received therapy and support. “Getting sober was difficult,” she told Glamour in a 2016 interview. “I went into rehab, I came out, and I didn’t stay sober. I still had issues occasionally.” While she shared multiple social media posts about being sober, she was struggling with disordered eating, and said in the documentary, “Food is the biggest challenge of my life. I don’t want to give it the power to say it controls my every thought, but it’s something I’m constantly thinking about.”
In her 2024 Teen Vogue interview, Lovato said the inspiration behind her social media series Cooking with Demi was her ongoing struggle with disordered eating and issues around food. “The biggest reason why I step foot in the kitchen is my recovery with food,” she said. “The first time that I ever stepped foot in a grocery store in treatment for my eating disorder, they took us on an outing …and we went to buy ingredients for a recipe. And I was just so overcome with emotion, so overstimulated and overwhelmed by the sight of so much food that I just broke down and cried.
“To go from that place to now going to the grocery store, getting ingredients myself, and cooking them for myself and my loved ones…it’s the ultimate f- you to my eating disorder. I’m not going to let it win.”
When asked what she’d tell others grappling with the same struggle, she said, “It’s such hard work to overcome these issues, but it’s so worth it. One of the greatest accomplishments that I’ve ever achieved is starting to feel comfortable in my skin. I’m not there yet. It’s not even that I’ve reached this end goal of endless love and acceptance for my body. It’s just that I’ve started to accept my body, and that to me is a place where I never thought that I would ever get to. I’m a work in progress.”
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Finding Light Past the Darkness
“I think the glimmer of hope started to change when I started to find joy and the little things in life,” she said in her June 2024 conversation at The Center for Youth Mental Health. “And that was something that was so foreign to me before because I was so used to, so used to not seeing hope.”
Before her fifth in-patient treatment stay, Lovato said she “knew what I needed to do, which was to live a life in recovery,” she said at the event. “Medication has helped me tremendously. It’s helped so many people tremendously. And I think I had hit another low, and I was like, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ I felt defeated. But then, when all of the key parts started to fit into place like a perfect puzzle, I started to find the light again.”
Throughout her recovery journey, Lovato said she has learned not to let her mental health or treatment define her. “It’s just a part of what makes me me, meaning my struggles have shaped me into the pottery that you see today, but it’s never become my identity since then,” she explained, adding that she’s “grateful for…what I’ve overcome.”
To learn more about identifying and treating co-occurring disorders and how to help yourself and loved ones, read all our coverage in Us Weekly and the harris project’s The Missing Issue, on newsstands and online now.
To purchase The Missing Issue for $8.99 go to https://magazineshop.us/harrisproject.
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health and/or substance use, you are not alone. Seek immediate intervention — call 911 for medical attention; 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline; or 1-800-662-HELP for the SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) National Helpline. Carrying naloxone (Narcan) can help reverse an opioid overdose.
