Selena Gomez: a megastar whose mission it is to save lives – and why she’ll likely succeed
TW: this article discusses mental health and touches on suicide
In May this year Selena Gomez’s charity, the Rare Impact Fund, hosted the first-ever Mental Health Youth Forum at the White House, with Jill Biden in attendance. For Gomez, the event was a long-time coming – for years she had been battling with both her own mental health and with finding a way she could use her platform to bring awareness to the issue. Now, she is releasing a documentary, My Mind & Me, about her life and health struggles over the last six years, with the aim of saving lives by sharing her story.
For Gomez, her mega-stardom – her Disney sitcoms, her on-and-off relationship with Justin Bieber, her multi-platinum-selling pop career, and her whopping 354 million Instagram followers – had long been a distraction from the woman she felt like she really was. Interviews where she was asked frivolous questions about boys rather than the issues she cared about started to seriously upset her. In the documentary, after one press tour, she is seen becoming increasingly frustrated about being made to feel like a “product”.
She had spent the last several years in recovery – having had a kidney transplant in 2017 and undergoing chemotherapy as part of her battle against the auto-immune disease lupus, and having attended treatment facilities in 2016 and 2018 after struggling with her mental health. During one of these hospitalisations, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
In 2020, on the mend and with a better idea of who she was and what she wanted, Gomez created the Rare Impact Fund with an aim to raise $100 million for free mental health services for children.
Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me
Six years in the making, My Mind & Me, from documentary maker Alek Keshishian, follows Gomez from her 2016 Revival Tour (of which Gomez cancelled the Europe and Latin American legs, citing anxiety and depression caused by lupus) up to the present day.
While mostly a linear history – following Gomez behind the scenes and on stage, going to the medical facility, returning to her hometown and high school, and travelling to Africa – the one-and-a-half-hour film is interwoven with snippets from the singer’s diaries. “Everything I ever wished for, I’ve had and done all of it. But it has killed me. Because there’s always Selena,” says one passage which Gomez reads out in a shaky voice.
The documentary paints a picture of the singer that few have seen before – or perhaps, that few will have taken the time to see. Gomez has been vocal about mental health, body positivity and her health for years, but having all of her causes and issues crammed into one film packs a real punch. She is incredibly vulnerable and open throughout, as she meets activists, indicating at one point that she thought about severely hurting herself and explaining at another point that at her most ill she had voices in her head.
As Gomez repairs, although she is keen to note that she is a work in process, she says she wants to actually make a difference, try to save lives and sees philanthropy as her future. After a dinner where she shares some of her past issues, attendees are visibly moved and those that come to speak to her talk about the power of her story.
Surviving Disney
Gomez’s mother was just 16 years old when she was born, and her parents divorced when she was five. Her mother has Italian ancestry while Gomez’s father is a second generation Mexican-American. The family struggled financially for most of her early life and her mother sometimes worked three jobs, but as a result Gomez was instilled with an unrelenting work ethic. She entered into pageants as a child and started her first proper acting job in 2002, when she was 10 years old, on PBS’s Barney & Friends.
Roles in Disney’s The Suite Life of Zack & Cody followed in 2006, Hannah Montana in 2007, and then in the comedy Wizards of Waverly Place, where she played the teenage witch Alex Russo, between 2007 and 2012.
Although Disney launched her career, Gomez has spent her adult life trying to build a brand of her own without the association. Speaking to Vogue in 2017 she said, “I worked with Disney for four years... It’s a very controlled machine. They know what they represent, and there was, 100 per cent, a way to go about things.”
At the Television Critics Association’s Summer Press Tour in 2021, she said, “I signed my life away to Disney at a very young age and I didn’t know what I was doing," but later clarified her comments to Radio Times, saying, “I’m beyond proud of the work that I did with Disney as well. It kind of shaped who I am in a way.”
In an interview with the New York Post in June this year she said about the Wizards of Waverly Place, “I adored being on that show so much... We got really lucky. I still look back at that and laugh at certain things just because I thought it was so fun.” Nevertheless, in the documentary, she mentions several times her frustration at being made to feel like she is still affiliated with Disney. “It’s a trigger,” says one of her team.
Post-Disney one of the first things Gomez did was star in the 2012 film Spring Breakers, alongside James Franco, Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson, about four girls who meet a drug dealer while on Spring Break and descend into a world of violence, drugs and crime. She could not have made a clearer effort to cut from her squeaky-clean past.
A teenage romance with Justin Bieber
Perhaps one of the cruellest but formative episodes of Gomez’s life was her extremely public, on-off relationship with Justin Bieber, which lasted for eight years between 2010 and 2018. Everyone who has been a teenager, or has met a teenager, can empathise with the emotional angst of adolescent romance – and Bieber and Gomez had to contend with theirs being splattered across the worldwide media for close to a decade.
The pair met in 2009, when Bieber apparently said Gomez was his celebrity crush, and they started dating sometime in 2010, announcing their relationship at the Vanity Fair Oscars party in February 2011. They were together for two years before breaking up, and would subsequently date on and off for another five years or so, before properly ending things in 2018 – the same year Bieber married model Hailey Baldwin Bieber.
Speaking to Complex in 2015, Bieber said: “I moved in with my girlfriend when I was 18. Started my own life with her. It was a marriage kind of thing. Living with a girl, it was just too much at that age. But we were so in love. Nothing else mattered. We were all about each other.
“But when it’s like that and you get your value from that, people will always disappoint you... Your full identity can’t be in that person. My identity was in her. Her identity was in me.”
Responding to an NPR interviewer in January 2020, who had asked about whether the time she dated Bieber was one of the “harder parts” of her life, Gomez said, “No, because I’ve found the strength in it. It’s dangerous to stay in a victim mentality. And I’m not being disrespectful, I do feel I was a victim to certain abuse... I had to find a way to understand it as an adult. And I had to understand the choices I was making.”
Some Beliebers have found it hard coming to terms with the end of the Bieber-Gomez relationship, leaving abuse across Baldwin (now Bieber)’s social media platforms. In 2019 Gomez seemed to ask fans to stop the hate, which had been particularly bad following the release of the track Look At Her Now which appeared to address the Bieber break-up. Speaking to fans in an Instagram Live Gomez said, “I am grateful for the response that the song is getting. I’m so grateful. However, I do not stand for women tearing women down. I will never, ever be by that... So please be kind to everyone.”
Speaking on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast in September, Hailey Bieber said of Gomez: “She doesn’t owe me anything. Neither of us owe anybody anything except respect. I respect her, a lot.”
A megaselling pop star
Gomez’s early success on screen was only the beginning. Although she had been putting out music with the band Selena Gomez & the Scene since 2008 (and not a small amount, either – the band produced three studio albums and seven singles), it was the 2013 release of Stars Dance, her first album as a solo artist, which marked the start of her mega-selling pop career. The album peaked at number one on the US charts, as did her subsequent albums, 2015’s Revival and 2020’s Rare.
In fact today there is a group of Selena fans that know her for her music rather than her acting. She has collaborated with ASAP Rocky, Kygo, Gucci Mane, American music producer Marshmello, Benny Blanco, J Balvin, Coldplay and Rema, over the years – and has made mega hits including 2015’s Good For You and 2019’s Lose You To Love Me (and their music videos on YouTube have amassed as many as 501 million and 414 million views).
This year she was nominated for a Best Latin Pop Album Grammy for her 2021 EP Revelación, which was sung entirely in Spanish. Gomez said to radio host Zane Lowe in January 2021, “This has been something I’ve wanted to do for 10 years, working on a Spanish project, because I’m so, so proud of my heritage, and just genuinely felt like I wanted this to happen.”
13 Reasons Why
Alongside her mother, Gomez was an executive producer on 13 Reasons Why. Based on the best-selling book by Jay Asher,the punchy Netflix teen drama explored the aftermath of a high school student’s suicide. The 2017 release of the series ignited debates around adolescent suicide, which is becoming an ever more pressing issue – according to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide in the US is now the second highest cause of death for people ages 10-14 and 25-34, and teenage cases of anxiety and depression have continued to rise throughout and since the pandemic.
The show itself received mixed reviews: “The overall message — one that probably appeals to teenagers — is that it’s possible to figure out why someone takes her own life, and therefore to guard against it happening to others,” reviewed The New York Times. “But the beleaguered school counsellor played by Derek Luke may have it right when he tells Clay, you can just never tell.”
The Guardian said, “The decision to depict rape graphically, and not briefly, either, was obviously taken with the intention of insisting we witness its brutality; personally, I found it to tip towards the gratuitous,” adding, “I wonder about its handling of suicide, which again is depicted graphically.”
But, speaking on the Elvis Duran and the Morning Show in 2017, Gomez said: “This is happening every day... Whether or not you wanted to see it, that’s what’s happening. The content is complicated. It’s dark and it has moments that are honestly very hard to swallow, and I understood that we were doing something that is difficult.”
Only Murders in the Building
Then, in 2021 Gomez returned to the small screen, to star in her first major TV series since the Wizards of Waverly Place – and, fascinatingly, it was a Disney Plus comedy show. Although the comparison between her old and new work really could stop there, Gomez herself said on Entertainment Weekly’s podcast, The Awardist, “I feel like Mabel [her Murders in the Building character] is an older version of Alex [her Wizards of Waverly Place character] in a way.”
Only Murders in the Building was created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman and stars Martin, Gomez and Martin Short, as three neighbours who start their own podcast after a suspicious death takes place in their New York apartment building. It was a huge hit, earning three Golden Globe Award nominations, four Emmy Award nominations and Gomez even won a Hollywood Critics Association TV Award for Best Actress in a streaming comedy show.
Speaking on The Awardist in June, Gomez said: “I’m not sure I was looking for a series, I was just looking for something in general,” she says. “This was just honestly a wonderful surprise.” When Martin and Short received Emmy nods in July, but Gomez didn’t, Martin said: “We’re dismayed that Selena was not nominated because she’s so crucial to our performances.” The series was renewed halfway through its first season and a second season was released in June, once again garnering a tonne of praise.
Health issues
In 2014 Gomez was diagnosed with lupus, an auto-immune disease that causes joint pain, skin rashes and tiredness. Shortly after the diagnosis, Gomez checked into the Meadows, in Arizona — the celebrity treatment centre that has hosted Kate Moss, Tiger Woods and Rush Limbaugh. In the following years she would continue to check into facilities, including a treatment centre in Tennessee where she stayed for 90 days in 2016 after cancelling parts of her Revival tour.
In My Mind & Me we see Gomez just before she enters the Tennessee centre. She’s thin and unsure of herself — still charming and kind, but obviously unhappy as she worries about whether her show is good enough, whether her body is womanly enough and whether everything is coming together well. Speaking to US Vogue in 2017, Gomez said: “My self-esteem was shot. I was depressed, anxious. I started to have panic attacks right before getting onstage, or right after leaving the stage. Basically I felt I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t capable.”
In 2017, in order to help manage her lupus, Gomez had a kidney transplant, which was donated to her by fellow actor and close friend Francia Raisa. Gomez told Today in October 2017, that, “I didn’t want to ask a single person in my life. The thought of asking someone to do that was really difficult for me. She volunteered and did it... The fact that she was a match, I mean, that’s unbelievable. That’s not real.”
The transplant seemed to have worked — for some time, at least. In My Mind & Me, Gomez starts to experience some of the same pain she did before her diagnosis, and her doctor tells her she may need to do another course of Rituxan, an antibody medication used for autoimmune diseases and some forms of cancer, which may stave away some of her joint pains for a year or so.
Body positivity
In 2020, Gomez launched the make-up line Rare Beauty, with 1 per cent of sales going to mental health charities. The idea behind the brand was that Gomez wanted to create products that would enhance natural features: “I’ve been a victim to wanting to change my face, and I think the most rewarding part of creating this line is that we create a place for people who don’t necessarily want to get work done,” she said. “I’ve been in makeup since I was 7 years old, and I feel like that kind of messed with me... It just made me question my own beauty for what it was.”
In May 2021, to coincide with mental health day, the brand launched an educational campaign about bringing mental health services and financial support to schools. Rare Beauty would match all donations to the Rare Impact Fund up to $200,000, there was a petition and a mental health ‘toolkit’ that could be shared online.
For years Gomez has been at odds with her social media presence, going through several periods of deleting Instagram (she’s the fifth most followed person on the app) — most recently in July 2019. Speaking on Live with Kelly and Ryan she said: “I think it’s just become really unhealthy for young people, including myself, to spend all of their time fixating on all of these comments and it was affecting me... It would make me depressed, it would make me feel not good about myself and look at my body differently.”
Mental health activism
Bringing awareness to, and normalising, mental health issues is both the impetus behind Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me, and for now, it seems, Gomez’s primary motivating factor in general. Speaking at The White House in May, Gomez said: “Mental health is very personal for me, and I hope that by using my platform to share my own story and working with incredible people like all of you I can help others feel less alone and find the help they need, which is honestly all I want.
“When it comes to talking about and de-stigmatising mental health, I want to ensure that everyone, no matter their age, their race, religion, sexual orientation, have access to services that support their mental health,” she added.
In 2019 she won a McLean Award for her Mental Health Advocacy, and at a McLean dinner that year she said, “I know that I have been given experiences and people and opportunities that have made my life exceptionally beautiful and sweet, and yet I struggle with my own thoughts and feelings at times... But this doesn’t make me faulty. This does not make me weak.”
After setting up the Rare Impact Fund, she launched a Mental Health app with her mother Mandy and CEO of The Newsette, Daniella Pierson in 2021. The idea with Wondermind was to create a space where people could come together to discuss their feelings, and also get help for their issues with psychiatrists, athletes, and celebrities onboard to take part in the project – Serena Williams was a recent podcast guest.
She has continued to talk to high-profile figures about mental health, too: In April 2020 she spoke to Miley Cyrus about her bipolar disorder, and in October 2020, mid-pandemic, she spoke to Vice President Kamala Harris in an Instagram live, saying: “I just read too much about how deep this country is being affected mentally. I’ve had so many dreams about creating places that people could go to.”
Gomez’s efforts have, by all accounts, been effective — even if simply because articles are being written about them. At her White House event, she spoke with President Biden, who thanked her for her work.
Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me makes two things clear: Gomez is resilient beyond measure, and, by campaigning for mental health and sharing her story, she is altering the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of people around the world.
Documentary fallout
Just a few days after its release Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me has been making waves online, and not only because of Gomez’s honesty and vulnerability.
Raisa, who donated her kidney to Gomez, was not mentioned in the documentary at all, and unfollowed Gomez on Instagram over the weekend after its release. According to the Daily Mail, matters became more awkward as Gomez commented on a TikTok that broke down the Raisa drama saying, “Sorry I didn’t mention every person I know.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone that was published on Thursday, Gomez had said: “I never fit in with a cool group of girls that were celebrities. My only friend in the industry really is Taylor.”
Reportedly, this isn’t the first time Raisa and Gomez have quarrelled since the operation, as allegedly Raisa has taken issue with some of Gomez’s lifestyle choices. The duo looked like they had patched things up as Raisa attended Gomez’s 30th birthday celebrations in July.
Since the operation Raisa has spoken about having to change her diet. According to the Daily Mail, she said: “Because I have one kidney functioning and it acts as a filter to my body, I can’t consume as much protein. I eat a lot — I know I’m skinny, but I chow down — so that was a very huge concern for me when I talked to the doctor.”
Gomez and Raisa’s representatives have been contacted for comment.
Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me is out on Apple TV+ on November 4
