Lady Gaga reveals Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder battle during LGBT youth visit
By Will Stroude
Lady Gaga opened up about living with mental illness yesterday while meeting with homeless LGBT youth on November 25.
The singer spent time at the Ali Forney Center in Harlem over Thanksgiving weekend, where she sang to and spoke with the young LGBT people who use their services. And yesterday (December 5), in an interview about her visit with NBC’s Today show, she spoke about living with the condition.
“I suffer from a mental illness – I suffer from PTSD. I’ve never told anyone that before,” she said, explaining that the condition developed after she was raped at the age of 19.
The singer revealed she told LGBT young people there about own illness during her recent visit to the Ali Forney Centre,
“The kindness that’s been shown to me, by doctors as well as my family and my friends, it’s really saved my life,” the singer told the teenagers at the centre.
The 30-year-old, who wowed The X Factor with a belter of a performance of new single ‘Million Reasons’ on Sunday, explained that while she struggles with her mental health “every day,” she uses meditation to “calm down.”
Gaga first spoke publicly about being raped in 2014. She told the Howard Stern programme: “I don’t want to be defined by it. I’ll be damned if somebody is going to say that every creatively intelligent thing that I ever did is all boiled down to one dickhead that did that to me.”
She added: “It wasn’t until I was a little bit older that I went, ‘Wow, that was really messed up… You were 20 years older than me. I was a kid.’”