Lady Gaga tells Oprah she wants to erase stigma attached to taking medication for mental illness

Lady Gaga has time and again proved herself to be one of the most ardent advocates of mental health in Hollywood. The incredibly talented singer-slash-actress has never shied away from talking about her own mental health struggles and uses every platform she can to call attention to the preconceived notions and stigma attached to mental illness. Therefore, when she got the chance to be the first special guest on Oprah’s 2020 Vision: Your Life In Focus Tour in Sunrise, Florida, last week, the 33-year-old used it as yet another opportunity to continue the conversation.

Sharing the stage with the talk show titan, the Million Reasons singer shared her thoughts on therapy, the social stigma placed on those of us who take medication to help mental health conditions, how she copes with her own struggles, and the effects of the post-traumatic stress disorder she developed after being raped at the age of 19. In an Entertainment Tonight clip of the event, Gaga is seen opening up about how helpful medicine has been in her mental health journey. "Faith, inspiration, hope, and, I also have to say, and I know that this is controversial in a lot of ways: medicine really helped me," she said.

"I think a lot of people are afraid of medicine for their brains to help them, and I really want to erase the stigma around this. I am sick of saying it over and over and over again," Gaga added. The star also credited cognitive therapy, dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and the practice of radical acceptance for helping improve her mental health. "I am sitting here with arguably the most powerful woman on the planet, and I have radically accepted that I will put my shame in a box all the way over there and make it very small, and say to myself, ‘I have mental health issues, I take a lot of medication to stay onboard, and I’m a survivor,'" she told Oprah.

According to a report by Rolling Stone, Gaga also spoke about how she's been living with fibromyalgia, revealing to Oprah that she was in "head-to-toe pain" even during their conversation. "What’s interesting about it is that I’ve found through neuropsych research and my relationship with my doctors that fibromyalgia can be treated through mental health therapy. And mental health is a medical condition, it should be treated as a medical condition. It should not be ignored," she said.

Her conversation with the A Star Is Born actress left Oprah in awe of the singer as Gaga opened up to the host and the 15,000 person audience at the event about how she was repeatedly raped by someone she knew growing up. "I was raped repeatedly when I was 19 years old, and I also developed PTSD as a result of being raped and also not processing that trauma. I all of a sudden became a star and was traveling the world going from hotel room to garage to limo to stage, and I never dealt with it, and then all of a sudden I started to experience this incredible intense pain throughout my entire body that mimicked the illness I felt after I was raped," she said.

A visibly emotional Oprah later sought out the singer backstage, praising her for the incredible vulnerability she'd displayed at the event. In an IGTV video shared by Oprah, she is seen telling a teary-eyed Gaga, "You were so amazing. You were so good. You were so vulnerable, you were so real, I couldn't even believe you were doing that. I was like, 'Am I hearing correctly?' Oh my, you were so real. You were so good, so strong, so you, it was so good. Thank you for doing that for me."