Lady Gaga Opens Up About Her "Psychotic Break" and Chronic Pain with Oprah

Lady Gaga joined Oprah Winfrey on stage for the host's 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus Tour and discussed her experiences with chronic pain and mental health.

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Oprah's 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus Tour - Sunrise, FL
(Image credit: Jason Koerner)
  • On Saturday, 15,000 fans turned out in Ft. Lauderdale for Oprah Winfrey and WW's 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus Tour.
  • Lady Gaga made an appearance at the Florida event to discuss her personal struggles with chronic pain and her "psychotic break" with the iconic host.
  • The singer also discussed her struggles with PTSD and her history of sexual assault.

Lady Gaga got about as real as as a person can get this weekend during an appearance at Oprah Winfrey and WW's 2020 Vision: Your Life in Focus Tour in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

The A Star Is Born actress took the stage with Oprah for a frank discussion about her health issues, both physical and mental. During the talk, Gaga discussed living with chronic pain and fibromyalgia and revealed that she once experienced a psychotic break.

"At some point, I had to tell people," Gaga said on stage during the candid chat. "I can’t live a lie, I’m an authentic person, and here I am, I’m perfectly imperfect, and we all are. We all have our things that we go through. I felt like, 'Why shouldn’t I share this when I share all of myself with the world all the time?' And I could maybe help people that have had psychotic breaks."

Gaga went on to describe the experience in detail, saying, "My whole body started tingling and I started screaming. I was in a hospital. It’s very difficult to describe what it feels like other than that you first start to tingle from head to toe and then you go numb."

"The brain goes, 'That’s enough, I don’t want to think about this anymore. I don’t want to feel this anymore.' Boom. You break from reality as you know it," she continued. "I know this is controversial in a lot of ways, but medicine really helped me."

The singer went on to explain that she's at peace about her health and her past, including her experiences with sexual assault.

"This happened for a reason. All the things I’ve been through," she said. "I was supposed to go through this. Even the rape—all of it. I radically accepted they happened because God was saying to me, 'I’m gonna show you pain. And then you’re going to help other people who are in pain because you’re going to understand it.'"

Now that's a level of strength and radical acceptance we didn't even know existed. Just one more reason to be in awe of Gaga.

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Kayleigh Roberts
Contributing Editor at Marie Claire

Kayleigh Roberts is a freelance writer and editor with over 10 years of professional experience covering entertainment of all genres, from new movie and TV releases to nostalgia, and celebrity news. Her byline has appeared in Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, The Atlantic, Allure, Entertainment Weekly, MTV, Bustle, Refinery29, Girls’ Life Magazine, Just Jared, and Tiger Beat, among other publications. She's a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.