Lady Gaga ‘Lucky to Be Alive’ After Suffering Psychotic Break

Pop icon Lady Gaga revealed in a new interview that she suffered a psychotic break in 2018, forcing her to cancel her world tour.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone, the “Abracadabra” singer revealed she was sexually assaulted at age 19 by a music producer right at the peak of her early fame, and the burden eventually became too much to bear.

The interview says the traumatic experience is the reason she left pop music for almost a decade and instead began an acting career while moving her sound towards jazz, soft rock, electronic music—anything but her usual pop sound. But even as she won an Oscar for A Star is Born and played her biggest hits at the Super Bowl, her mental health was unraveling rapidly.

“I did A Star Is Born on lithium,” she told the reporter. On the tour for her rock-tinged album Joanne, right after shooting that movie, she experienced a psychotic break.

“There was one day that my sister said to me, ‘I don’t see my sister anymore,’” she said. “And I canceled the tour. There was one day I went to the hospital for psychiatric care. I needed to take a break. I couldn’t do anything…I completely crashed. It was really scary. There was a time where I didn’t think I could get better… I feel really lucky to be alive. I know that might sound dramatic, but we know how this can go.”

She credits her fiancé, Michael Polansky, for helping her on her road to recovery.

“Being in love with someone that cares about the real me made a very big difference,” she said. “How do you learn how to be yourself with someone when you don’t know how to be yourself with anyone?”

She explained she now considers herself “a healthy, whole person,” and the road to recovery is the reason for the title of her latest album, Mayhem, which was hailed as one of her best albums on release and has now been nominated for seven Grammys.

“It was months and months and months of rediscovering everything that I’d lost,” she says. “And I honestly think that’s why it’s called Mayhem. Because what it took to get it back was crazy.”