Demi Lovato has been sober for more than five years, but she didn’t take her recovery seriously until her parents banned her from seeing her younger sister, Madison De La Garza.
“I knew that I had a lot of life ahead of me but one of the main reasons of getting sober was so that I could be around my little sister because my mom and dad [said I couldn’t be around her] if I was doing stuff,” Lovato, 25, revealed on an episode of “The Jonathan Ross Show,” airing Saturday.
“The final [intervention], everyone was like, ‘We are no longer going to leave, we are leaving,’” Lovato said. “That was the moment when I thought, ‘Okay, I really need to get help and get sober.’ This time I knew … I had hit rock bottom and I just needed to do this for myself.”
The “Tell Me You Love Me” singer, who has struggled with bi-polar disorder, drug abuse, alcoholism and eating disorders, admitted that her loved ones tried to intervene several times before it actually stuck, and she received in-patient treatment in 2011 after a physical altercation with a backup dancer on tour.
“I was looking out my tour bus window, I was living my dream, and I was just sitting there, looking out the window and crying, thinking, ‘Why am I crying? What’s wrong with me?’” Lovato recalled last year.
“Little did I know, there was a chemical imbalance in my brain. Because I didn’t tell people what I need, I ended up self-medicating and coping with unhealthy behaviors,” she added. “I was dealing with bipolar depression and didn’t know what was wrong with me.”
Thankfully, her support system helped her through her darkest period, and Lovato is now an outspoken advocate for mental health awareness and even co-owns a mental health treatment center.
“I had family and really close friends and my manager, they all were by my side through everything,” she said. “I wouldn’t be here without them. My fans too, I feel they gave me a reason to live and I’m forever grateful.”
