Selena Gomez Shares Her Journey With Bipolar Disorder in “My Mind & Me”

AppleTV+”Selena Gomez: My mind and Iis about making viewers rethink how they think about mental health. The new documentary follows the child star’s journey through his bipolar diagnosis, showing what it’s like to live with the condition. The film’s structure and tone match what it’s like to live with depression, an experience film director Alek Keshishian shares with his leading man. “You have your good days, you have your dark days, you have moments of revelation and then you have moments where everything seems to collapse,” Keshishian tells POPSUGAR. “It was a very difficult story to tell because I had 200 hours of film. So there were probably 6,000 different films that I could have made from that. And for me, my task was to be able to show the greatest journey.” , but even inside it, you have to be very careful: you can’t get too dark and stay in the dark for too long because it would be impossible for people to see the light.”

With “My Mind & Me,” Keshishian explores multiple sides of Gomez’s life, showing her reading devastating passages from her journals, finding peace visiting childhood friends from Texas, and looking like the world-famous pop star that she is. That juxtaposition is important to the trauma therapist. Adriana Alejandro, LMFTfounder of latinx therapy. “Bipolar disorder is something that has been stigmatized, and there have been huge misconceptions where people think that bipolar disorder is when someone is happy and then angry. And that’s completely false,” he shares. “For [Selena Gomez] providing education on what it really is and what it’s like to live with it, and still have that duality of being successful, is very inspiring. And the reason why it’s so important to the Latino/Latinx community is because there are so many cultural stigmas around mental health and therapy, and she talks about both.”

“[The film is] not all happy endings, not all of a sudden you wake up one day and everything is perfect,” declares Keshishian, although hope is a central tenet of the film, although he is also careful to show the complicated nature of reality. The director describes “My Mind & Me” as part of an effort to “help others be able to see the story of a woman who comes out of the deep and learns to find [the] light again.”

Known for his acclaimed “Virgin: Truth or DareIn the documentary, director Keshishian met Gomez in 2015 when he was filming her “Hands to Myself” music video. He originally started filming the young star in 2016 to capture behind the scenes of his revival tour before they mutually decided that the time was not right. He returned when Gomez was planning a trip to Kenya to support a cause he truly believed in. “I thought, now there’s a really interesting story about this young lady who had just come out of the mental health hospital. And she had this new diagnosis. And it was like she was learning how to live again. But she was also still in recovery. And yet I really wanted to help others.”

The film follows Gomez as she explores her idea of ​​continuing the mental health education preschoolers get around identifying emotions. “The feelings just get more complicated and it gets harder to navigate,” she says in the film. “Why wouldn’t I keep talking about it?” It seems like a clear good, but Gomez hesitates, she’s not sure if she’s qualified, and then stalls further when the WE charity, she partnered with get hit with a scandal. Still, she perseveres, eventually creating the rare impact background to build and support the curriculum he needed as he grew up.

For his part, Alejandre, LMFT supports the idea of ​​the Gómez curriculum. “That identification of feelings is very important. I work with a lot of people who can’t identify their emotions,” she shares. “A lot of times, specifically within our community, because of intergenerational trauma and just being in survival mode in the past and present, it prevents us from learning those skills.”

The other thing that seems to really help Gomez is focusing on the one-on-one human connection. She is at her best when she speaks with students in Kenya and visits with family and friends in Texas. In those scenes, she appears relaxed and charming, her charisma that made her a star shines more through her casual clothes than after the various glamor shoots we see her perform as part of her job.

“The hardest part about depression and anxiety is that you tend to isolate yourself even more. And yet we know that human connection is really strong medicine,” says Keshishian when asked about the importance of showing those moments in the movie. And therapist Alejandre agrees: “If someone is having a hard time, it’s important to talk to someone, even if we don’t know the person on the other side, that’s fine. Expressing it verbally is important.”

Ideally, of course, each would have a supportive community, including professional therapists. In making “My Mind & Me,” Keshishian worked with Gomez to show what her mental health issues are like to help others name them for themselves. “Feeling it and feeling it would maybe give the audience an opportunity to identify certain things in themselves…by showing her at some of those stages, she could provide information to others so they could seek treatment and power, to use the information to continue their Curious to get more information.

“Selena Gomez is toasting through her storytelling [a way] to debunk these myths and allow people to share their own stories about mental health,” says Alejandre, LMFT. In her practice, Alejandre often sees other second- and third-generation Latinxs shoulder guilt that echoes that of Gomez: They feel the need to show gratitude no matter how stormy they are for all the sacrifices their families have made for them, but there is also hope that Gomez and his generation are rolling back the cultural factors they have made Latinas the group with the highest suicidal ideation.

“The younger generation is so powerful in breaking all these cycles that have been passed down,” Alejandre says. “I really see a lot of the younger generation being more open about their mental health and talking about it, and asking their parents for therapy… And so we’re seeing an increase in requests for services in certain areas of the Latino population.” , which is really wonderful.”

Of course, barriers still remain, including the difficulty for those of us with fewer resources than Selena Gomez to find and access services. But she is also working there, which is why Alejandre created Latinx Therapy and Gómez continues to speak out and raise funds for mental health. “When a lot of people hear Selena Gomez talk about her journey, it feels very healing for a lot of people, because they can relate,” explains Alejandre, LMFT, “Healing requires that connection.”