Halsey Reveals Struggle With Bipolar Disorder In Candid Interview

March 11, 2016

Halsey has revealed that she struggles with bipolar disorder and that diagnosis as a teenager led her to attempt suicide.

The 21-year-old singer, whose debut album Badlands reached Number 2 in the US, opened up about her past in a recent interview with Billboard. Speaking candidly about experiences she had pursuing a heroin addict, she talked about the years she spent in New York after high school.

“I was following a boy,” she says. “I was 17. He was 23, and he had a really serious heroin addiction.”

She also reveals that her struggle with bipolar disorder saw her spend several weeks in a psychiatric hospital during her senior year.

“I had tried to kill myself,” she admits. “I was an adolescent; I didn’t know what I was doing. Because I was 17, I was still in a children’s ward. Which was terrifying. I was in there with 9-year-olds who had tried to kill themselves.”

After being bullied in high school and more recently struggling with fame – “In my camp we have a different F-word and C-word, ‘fame’ and ‘celebrity’ [and] I hate them.” – the singer reveals that singing has been her salvation.

“I could be having the worst day of my life, hate my body, think I’m fat, think I suck, and as soon as I hear the first few notes of my intro, that all goes away,” she says. “Everything that I hate about myself goes away when I walk onstage. That’s why I cling to it so much — it keeps me from killing myself.”

She is an artist who shot to fame quickly after she released her synths-y, Ghost, and because of her savvy approach to social media. She has 2 million followers on Instagram, over a million on Twitter and 80,000 on Facebook, and she updates them constantly.

“I talk to them like real fucking human beings, because they are,” she says of her social presence. “But then there’s also a sense of entitlement, where they feel like they have the right to chastise me like they would a friend. And sometimes you want to be like, ‘Who the fuck are you to say that?’”

Halsey recently performed Justin Bieber’s Love Yourself for a sick Like A Version cover, and brought the house down in two Sydney performances back in January.

If you or anyone close to you is suffering, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or visit Beyond Blue or Kids Helpline now.

Watch: Halsey – Love Yourself (Justin Bieber Cover For ‘Like A Version’)