Demi Lovato “Opens Up” About Her Eating Disorder Again

Demi Lovato is great and all, and I’m glad that she can be an inspiration to so many young girls who have suffered from (or are still suffering from) an eating disorder, bipolar disorder and/or self-harming. I gotta say, though – I wish she’d sorta change the record a bit. She’s “opened up” so many times about her struggles, her trip to rehab and subsequent recovery that I feel like I’ve been brainwashed like Zoolander was by Mugatu, except instead of killing the Prime Minister of Malaysia, I’m just… tired of hearing this f-cking story.

From Nightline:

Struggling with depression, bipolar disorder and an eating disorder through her pre-teen and teenage years is something that Lovato has been outspoken about. At age 11, she said, she started cutting herself.

“I had been battling with depression for years, and an eating disorder for years, and I had been self-harming, and other things, self-medicating, and I just wasn’t happy anymore, and I needed to, I needed to change my life,” Lovato said. “There were times beforehand where I had had meltdowns, or things like that, and my mom begged me to go into treatment, but I told her I would get better.”

Finally, she realized she needed to get help.

“When I finally didn’t get better, I knew that I was in trouble, and I knew that I couldn’t do it on my own,” she said. “So, whether I liked it or not, if I wanted to continue to live, and have a long career, or just be happy, then I needed to listen to what my management team and my family was saying, and go into treatment.”

Lovato went through two stints in rehab, and while she said it helped, she still battles with her disorders every day. She recently became an honorary chairwoman for this year’s Mental Health Awareness Day, hosted by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to help raise awareness.

“I can’t sit here and say that I am Miss Recovery … that I’ll be that way for the rest of my life,” she said. “You don’t know, and that’s why you have to take it a day at a time.”

I don’t want to reduce the seriousness of what Demi went through (and is still going through – you’re not just miraculously better overnight from these issues) or the work she’s doing now to raise awareness for others, but I sort of feel bad that this is such a central focus of ANY press done about her these days. She’s got a new single out that’s doing fantastic, but I guarantee that any article about her or interview with her you see will talk about her mental health issues, etc.