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It's a good month for bipolar awareness: Just one week after Catherine Zeta-Jones stated that she has bipolar II disorder, Demi Lovato has revealed that she, too, is bipolar.
"I never found out until I went into treatment that I was bipolar," Lovato explains in an interview with People. "Looking back it makes sense. There were times when I was so manic, I was writing seven songs in one night and I'd be up until 5:30 in the morning."
Lovato, 18, went into rehab last fall for "mental and physical issues"; she recently revealed that those issues included depression, anorexia, bulimia and cutting. But understanding her bipolar disorder, as it turns out, was a big part of the battle.
"I feel like I am in control now where my whole life I wasn't in control," Lovato said post-treatment. As a step toward maintaining that control, Demi recently announced that she would not be returning to Sonny with a Chance, the Disney Channel show that made her a star. "I don't think going back to Sonny would be healthy for my recovery," she says, because performing in front of a camera "would make me nervous."
Last week, Lovato tweeted her support for Zeta-Jones, who is opening up about her own struggle with bipolar disorder following a brief hospital stay.
And on Wednesday morning, Good Morning America previewed Lovato's upcoming 20/20 interview about her recovery, in which she talks about how bullying drove her to an eating disorder -- and how she started cutting herself at age 11. "(It was) a way of expressing my own shame, of myself, on my own body," Lovato says of cutting herself. "I was matching the inside to the outside. And there were some times where my emotions were just so built up, I didn't know what to do. The only way that I could get instant gratification was through an immediate release on myself."
