Constant struggle
DEMI Lovato didn’t initially practice what she preached after she finished treatment for substance abuse and began promoting her sobriety.
The pop star – who has frequently chronicled her past issues with drugs and alcohol – was 18 when she first went to get help in 2010. But that first round of treatment ultimately did not lead to Lovato overcoming her vices.
“I wasn’t working my programme, I wasn’t ready to get sober,” Lovato reveals in her new YouTube documentary, Demi Lovato: Simply Complicated.
Those close to Lovato quickly realised that the Stone Cold singer was still struggling with the same issues that caused her to seek treatment.
“There was one night when I used a bunch of coke and I popped a few Xanax bars, and I began to choke a little bit,” Lovato said. “My heart started racing, and I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, I might be overdosing right now.”
But Lovato hid her problems from the public and put on a false front that she had conquered her substance issues.
“We were in New York and she clearly was on something, and she was on air promoting this new way of life, and I was like, ‘You’re so full of it’,” her manager Phil McIntyre says on the documentary.
Lovato went as far as to fake her drug tests by submitting other people’s urine, she revealed. At one point, she was put in a psychiatric unit, but even then she didn’t hit her breaking point.
She recalled the final time she drank, she threw up the next morning on the way to the airport before performing on American Idol while hungover.
The singer ultimately made the move to get sober once and for all after her entire team laid down an ultimatum: If she didn’t get clean, they were all leaving her.
Lovato, 25, was also diagnosed as bipolar during that very first experience getting treatment, which she believes explains some of her past behaviour, such as staying up all night writing music as a kid.
She celebrated her fiveyear anniversary of being sober this past spring. She recently explained on The Jonathan Ross Show that she realised she had hit “rock bottom” when her family told her they were leaving her.
“It’s embarrassing to look back on the person that I was,” Lovato says in the new documentary. – New York Daily News/Tribune News Service