Demi Lovato on Rediscovering ‘Hope’ After Five In-Patient Mental Health Treatments
On Monday night, Demi Lovato shared words of experience and wisdom at the Center For Youth Mental Health at NewYork-Presbyterian’s annual benefit. The singer has rarely ever shied away from sharing the raw truths about her complex journey with her mental health, substance abuse, and eating disorder. In conversation with Dr. Charlie Shaffer, she shed light on the lessons she took away from being admitted to inpatient treatment programs on five different occasions.
“I have been to inpatient treatment five times, and it has something that every single time I walked back into a treatment center, I felt defeated,” Lovato explained, per People. “And I know that experience firsthand, but I think the glimmer of hope was when I started putting in the work and I started to, whether it was work, a program, or talk to my treatment team and build relationships there.”
She added: “I think the glimmer of hope started to change when I started to find joy and the little things in life. And that was something that was so foreign to me before because I was so used to, so used to not seeing hope.”
It took being admitted for a fifth time for Lovato to realize that she “definitely felt different” and to give herself credit for making it to that point in her journey. “It felt like I had hit rock bottom, and I just knew what I needed to do, which was to live a life in recovery,” she said. “And that was something that I pushed off for so long.”
Lovato has documented her hopeful recoveries and ill-fated crashes in multiple documentaries throughout her career, but also in her music. In 2021, she released Dancing with the Devil… the Art of Starting Over with an accompanying documentary series, both tracking her recovery from a drug overdose in 2018. As this narrative became so deeply intertwined with her highly-publicized life, Lovato needed to learn how to separate her mental health from her identity.
“It wasn’t until I went into treatment for the first time that I realized this isn’t who I am. It’s just a part of what makes me me, meaning my struggles have shaped me into the pottery that you see today, but it’s never become my identity since then,” she shared. “It’s just become something about me that makes me a little interesting, I guess you could say … [I’m] grateful for the things that I’ve been through and what I’ve overcome.”