Selena Gomez has responded to the reaction her documentary Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me received from some members of the public, denying claims that she is a "victim."
In recent years, the singer and actress has been open about her bipolar diagnosis and the pressures of fame. In the documentary produced by Apple TV, viewers followed Gomez on her healing journey starting in 2016, getting a rare and raw insight into her world.
While My Mind & Me was intended to artfully document Gomez's 2016 Revival tour, it ended up following her life during a time when she battled depression, anxiety and panic attacks and checked herself into a psychiatric hospital suffering from psychosis.
Gomez canceled the remaining 25 dates on her tour in Europe and Latin America, telling People in a statement that she had: "Discovered that anxiety, panic attacks, and depression can be side effects of lupus, which can present their own challenges." She also received a bipolar disease diagnosis shortly afterward.
Speaking to Vanity Fair in article published on Monday, Gomez revealed she previously asked if she could pull the plug on the documentary, due to how personal it was. However, she changed her mind after fans started sharing similar stories with her and said she has "survived a lot."
Newsweek emailed a spokesperson for Gomez for comment on Monday.
"I asked my team if it was possible to pull out. Lawyers got involved, but we never took it to Apple because everything was locked...When the movie came out, I didn't look at anything for a few days, and then I was scared to leave the house," she said.
This soon changed, with Gomez explaining: "I just started to embrace it and I felt like it was a really good thing. However, I like to remind people that that is definitely nowhere close to where I am now. My mind was not right and chemically imbalanced, and it was really difficult. People were calling me a victim. That frustrates me, because being vulnerable is actually one of the strongest things you can do."
She added: "That narrative is not going to take over my life. I'm grateful every day. And I have my days like everyone else, but I'm no victim. I just survived a lot. There isn't a part of me that wants anyone to feel sorry for me."
During the documentary, Gomez's former assistant Theresa Mingus spoke about the actress' previous mental health issues.
"At one point, she's like, 'I don't wanna be alive right now.' You look into her eyes and there's nothing there. It was just pitch black and it's so scary," she said. "You're like, 'F*** this. This needs to end. We need to go home.'"
Gomez's friend Raquelle Stevens also recalled a period she described as "very chaotic," when Gomez started "hearing all these voices" that "kept getting louder and louder" and "triggered some sort of psychotic break."
She added: "If anybody saw what I saw in the state that she was in at the mental hospital, they wouldn't have recognized her at all. I was devastated because psychosis can last from days to weeks to months to years to life."
Elsewhere in the Vanity Fair article, Gomez revealed that she is unable to carry children due to various medical issues.
"I haven't ever said this," she said. "But I unfortunately can't carry my own children. I have a lot of medical issues that would put my life and the baby's in jeopardy. That was something I had to grieve for a while."
Gomez has battled lupus, a chronic autoimmune illness which attacks healthy tissue within one's body. She received chemotherapy for the condition but when her kidneys began shutting down on her, Gomez had a kidney transplant.
Her good friend, Francia Raisa, donated one of her kidneys to Gomez in 2017 for the successful surgery.
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