Selena Gomez May Not Be Able To Carry Children Due To Bipolar Disorder
In a candid interview, the singer and actress says medications will likely affect her ability to get pregnant.
Selena Gomez is sharing an intimate look into her life in an Apple TV+ documentary, My Mind & Me, in which she details and documents her devastating health struggles. And during an interview promoting the film, the 30-year-old shared how a bipolar disorder diagnosis may affect her ability to have children.
While chatting with Rolling Stone for the magazine’s December cover story, Gomez opened up about her hopes of becoming a mother one day — despite predicted difficulties. Apparently, the two medications she is taking for bipolar — a condition which causes extreme mood swings — will likely make it hard for her to carry her own children.
"That's a very big, big, present thing in my life," Gomez told the outlet, noting that she would eventually love to become a parent through other means.
"However I'm meant to have them, I will," she added.
According to the National Library of Medicine, treatment of bipolar disorder during pregnancy is hard to navigate. Stopping the use of medication “exposes the patient and her baby to potential harms related to bipolar relapses and residual mood symptom-related dysfunction.” Yet, certain drugs used to treat the mental health condition have been associated with birth defects and other neonatal abnormalities in babies.
Selena Gomez for Rolling Stone.
Also in the interview, Gomez detailed an episode of psychosis she endured in 2018, which led to her bipolar diagnosis. Although she doesn’t remember much from that time, she explained that she had difficulty trusting people, experienced paranoia, and spent several months in treatment. Her friends apparently didn’t recognize who she’d become.
"It was just that I was gone," she said, noting that doctors prescribed numerous medications to try to find something that would work for her. "There was no part of me that was there anymore."
The Only Murders in the Building star started feeling more like herself after finding a psychiatrist who took her off all of the drugs but the two she’s on now.
"He really guided me," Gomez said. "But I had to detox, essentially, from the medications I was on. I had to learn how to remember certain words. I would forget where I was when we were talking. It took a lot of hard work for me to (a) accept that I was bipolar, but (b) learn how to deal with it because it wasn’t going to go away."
Selena Gomez in Rolling Stone.
Gomez has been open and honest about her struggles with anxiety and depression, as well as her lupus diagnosis, which led to a kidney transplant in 2017. The autoimmune disease flairs up due to stress — something the former Disney Channel star, sadly, knows all too well.
"I'm going to be very open with everybody about this: I've been to four treatment centers," she told Rolling Stone. "I think when I started hitting my early 20s is when it started to get really dark, when I started to feel like I was not in control of what I was feeling, whether that was really great or really bad."
Now, Gomez is anxious to share her story in My Mind & Me, but hopeful it will help others who may be experiencing similar things. She did say, however, that after its release, she plans to step away from the spotlight once again.
“This is probably the most you’ll hear about me for a while,” Gomez insisted. “I want this to come out, but I also want this behind me. Every now and then it’s important to just disappear.”
