Lady Gaga recently shared that she has been living with post-traumatic stress disorder, and now the singer has written an open letter to explain her feelings further. She posted the letter to the website of her Born This Way Foundation.
Gaga said that she “wrestled” with the decision to speak about it for years due to the stigmas that are attached.
“There is a lot of shame attached to mental illness, but it’s important that you know that there is hope and a chance for recovery.”
Gaga explained in detail the challenges that she faces living with PTSD, such as dissociative states where she can’t regulate her emotions or communicate, which takes her anxiety so far that she ends up in a state of somatization. She described somatization as “pain in the body caused by an inability to express my emotional pain in words.”
The good news is that she feels like talking about it will help her deal with it more effectively.
“I am doing various modalities of psychotherapy and am on medicine prescribed by my psychiatrist. However, I believe that the most inexpensive and perhaps the best medicine in the world is words,” she wrote. “Kind words…positive words…words that help people who feel ashamed of an invisible illness to overcome their shame and feel free. This is how I and we can begin to heal. I am starting today, because secrets keep you sick. And I don’t want to keep this secret anymore.”