Demi Lovato Suffered 3 Strokes and a Heart Attack After Her 2018 Overdose

Demi Lovato's 2018 overdose triggered three strokes and a heart attack, Lovato shares in the trailer for her documentary "Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil."

  • Demi Lovato's 2018 overdose triggered three strokes and a heart attack, Lovato shares in the trailer for her upcoming documentary, Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil.
  • "I've had a lot of lives—I'm on my ninth life," Lovato says in the trailer.
  • Speaking to reporters Wednesday, she shared that she has lasting brain damage from the overdose, and no longer drives due to issues with her vision.

The trailer for Demi Lovato's upcoming YouTube documentary, Demi Lovato: Dancing with the Devil, dropped Wednesday, and in it, Lovato shares some devastating details about her near-fatal 2018 overdose. "I had three strokes, I had a heart attack," she says. "My doctors said that I had five to 10 more minutes."

Speaking on a Television Critics Association panel Wednesday, as People reports, Lovato further detailed the lasting physical impacts of her overdose. "I was left with brain damage, and I still deal with the effects of that today. I don't drive a car, because I have blind spots on my vision," she said. "And I also for a long time had a really hard time reading. It was a big deal when I was able to read out of a book, which was like two months later because my vision was so blurry."

"Any time that you suppress a part of yourself, it's going to overflow," Lovato says in the YouTube trailer, which also features her friends and family as well as Elton John and Christina Aguilera. "I crossed a line that I had never crossed," she continues, before the camera cuts to best friend Matthew Scott Montgomery who asks, "Are we talking about heroin? Are we doing this?"

"I've had a lot of lives—I'm on my ninth life," Lovato says. "I'm ready to get back to doing what I love, which is making music." Speaking at Wednesday's press conference, she noted, "As long as I continue to tell my truth, I'm going to make music that resonates with people."

"Everything had to happen in order for me to learn the lessons that I learned," Lovato told People Wednesday. "It was a painful journey, and I look back and sometimes I get sad when I think of the pain that I had to endure to overcome what I have, but I don't regret anything."

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Emily Dixon
Morning Editor

Emily Dixon is a British journalist who’s contributed to CNN, Teen Vogue, Time, Glamour, The Guardian, Wonderland, The Big Roundtable, Bust, and more, on everything from mental health to fashion to political activism to feminist zine collectives. She’s also a committed Beyoncé, Kacey Musgraves, and Tracee Ellis Ross fan, an enthusiastic but terrible ballet dancer, and a proud Geordie lass.