Lady Gaga opens up about mental health, sharing experiences and concerns for youth

Lady Gaga is known for her humanitarian approach to life, and her newest speech focused on what she termed a “global mental health crisis.”

Lady Gaga is more than a singer, an actress, and a songwriter. She’s a true humanitarian, seeking ways to help those who are suffering. And in her newest speech at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation Gala, Gaga shared her concern for young people in particular. The songstress also addressed her own emotional well-being.

Gaga began her speech Thursday night at the gala with two cautions. Addressing 500 audience members at Beverly Hills’ Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, the singer confessed first that she didn’t feel worthy of inclusion on the list of honorees for the SAG-AFTRA Foundation’s 3rd annual Patron of the Artists Awards.

In addition to that modest statement, Gaga warned the audience that she had devoted more than three hours to penning her speech.

“So if you’d like to settle in or possibly leave, I just wanted to give you the opportunity,” added the singer.

But that caution apparently wasn’t needed, as the audience remained and listened to the 32-year-old songstress weave her acceptance speech with a request to strengthen services and support for mental health. She described the world as in “the midst of a global mental health crisis.”

Beyond discussing the need for better services to help those with emotional health problems, Gaga issued a pledge to provide funds through a partnership with the SAG-AFTRA Foundation. The singer expressed concern about the need to help “a generation of young people who do not believe that their voices are worth hearing, that their pain has no end, and that their contributions are not valuable enough to move the needle in society and culture. ”

Gaga took her passion one step further, getting candid about her own emotional health.

“Today, one in four people experience mental health crisis,” stated the singer. “I am one of those people.”

Gaga recalled turning into a “yes” woman because she didn’t feel “empowered to say no.” She suffered emotionally at first, and then experienced “physical chronic pain, fibromyalgia, panic attacks, acute trauma responses and debilitating mental spirals that have included suicidal ideation and masochistic behavior.”

The singer expressed her wish that a system had been set up to “protect and guide me…to empower me to say no to things I felt I had to do.”

And she urged the foundation to join her in creating such a system for current and future artists.

“So what I’m gently trying to say, or firmly rather, that I believe it to be imperative that the SAG-AFTRA Foundation expand in its programs and provide for ones specifically devoted to mental health,” summed up Gaga. “How about we make a SAG-AFTRA Born This Way program? Why not?”

We applaud Lady Gaga for continuing to further mental health awareness and using her impact as a celebrity to aid those in need!