Lady Gaga candidly revealed in a new interview that she was hospitalized for a mental health crisis in the midst of her 2017–18 Joanne World Tour.
“There was one day I went to the hospital for psychiatric care,” the pop star, 39, said in a Rolling Stone cover story published Thursday, November 13. “I needed to take a break. I couldn’t do anything. … I completely crashed. It was really scary.”
Gaga (real name Stefani Germanotta) shared that she was in such a bad state at the time that she “didn’t think [she] could get better.”
“I feel really lucky to be alive,” she added. “I know that might sound dramatic, but we know how this can go.”
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Ultimately, Gaga canceled the final 10 dates of her tour due to fibromyalgia, which the Mayo Clinic defines as a “long-term condition that involves widespread body pain.”
“There was one day that my sister [Natali Germanotta] said to me, ‘I don’t see my sister anymore,’” the “Abracadabra” singer recalled to the magazine. “And I canceled the tour.”
However, Gaga acknowledged that her psyche started unraveling long before the Joanne World Tour.
“I did A Star Is Born on lithium,” she told Rolling Stone of the psychiatric medication typically used to treat bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. (She filmed the 2018 movie in 2017.)
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These days, Gaga takes fewer antipsychotics.
“I’m on some, yeah, but not as many,” she shared. “I weaned off of a lot of them.”
Gaga credits her fiancé, Michael Polansky, with pulling her out of a dark place.
“Being in love with someone that cares about the real me made a very big difference,” she told the publication, calling herself a “healthy, whole person” now.
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The couple got engaged last year but met in 2019 while she was still working out her mental health issues.
“I was smoking three packs of cigarettes, sitting on the porch all day,” she remembered. “[Publicly] I was as great as I could be for someone that smoked weed all day, knocked back a couple bottles of wine and passed out.”
Polansky, 42, admitted to Rolling Stone that even he was worried about Gaga despite having known her for only a short time.
“The piece that I always noticed was how disempowered she felt. Not in charge of her own life,” he said. “I’d never met somebody so incredibly talented and gifted feel so disempowered.”
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Gaga chimed in, “What he saw was, this is somebody that feels very far away from what they’re supposed to be doing. He wanted to take care of me. And I’ve never been loved that way. My life was serious to him. It was not a party. He helped me see that my life was precious.”
In the same interview, the pair disclosed that they are planning to marry either during or after Gaga’s ongoing tour, The Mayhem Ball.
“We’re talking about it all the time,” Polansky, a venture capitalist, said. “We have these breaks, and they’re tempting. It’s like, ‘OK, can we get married that weekend?’ We don’t want a really big wedding, but we want to enjoy it. In a lot of ways, we already feel married, so it’s not like it’s gonna change much.”
One thing that will change? “Being a mom is the thing I want the most,” Gaga noted. “And he’s gonna be a beautiful father. We’re really excited about that.”
