Katy Perry Reveals She ‘Couldn’t Imagine Living’ While She Was ‘Clinically Depressed’

Katy Perry is opening up about her struggle with depression as she prepares to release an album that touches on the highs and the lows of the past two years of her life. The singer, who is just weeks away from giving birth to her first child with fiancé Orlando Bloom, performed her new single, “Daisies,” on Good Morning America Friday, sharing more about the writing process of her upcoming album.

Having performed her uplifting new single in her backyard, Perry broadcast from home amid the coronavirus pandemic, saying that for her much-anticipated fifth album, fans can expect “a record about resilience and finding the light at the end of the tunnel.” She then shared some of her own experiences with mental health over the last two years in a candid discussion about her emotional and spiritual journey.

“I’ve been writing it [the album] over the past two years and at the beginning of those two years, they were really difficult,” she admitted. “I was kind of clinically depressed coming out of that and didn’t know what my life was, and if I was gonna be — I couldn’t really even imagine living, to be completely honest.”

Perry’s life has made a complete 180 at this point. “Now I’ve done the work, and I’m still doing the work emotionally, spiritually, physically, psychologically,” she continued. “Now I’ve come to this light at the end of the tunnel, which means I am gonna live. And not only that, I’m gonna bring life into the world. So it ends in a positive place so far.”

After revealing she was expecting her first child in the music video for “Never Worn White” in March, the American Idol judge opened up about the impact becoming a mother has had on her in an interview with SiriusXM’s Mikey Piff. Explaining that the pregnancy “wasn’t on accident,” she gushed over how grateful she has been for “everything that I have been able to do and achieve and all the goals that I’ve been kind of able to check off my list and dreams and the life I’ve lived thus far, and I think I’ve just been trying to create this space in my own life where I’m not running myself too ragged and like, you know, creating space for something new to happen like this.”