The award-winning singer, actress, and entrepreneur has been admirably forthcoming about her mental health journey. And with proceeds from her billion-dollar Rare Beauty company, she’s eager to help others.
The Selena Gomez of now—the Golden Globe–nominated actress, billionaire philanthropist, and entrepreneur—wouldn’t be possible without the Selena Gomez of several years ago, when the young singer was struggling with her mental health. In 2018 Gomez had an episode of psychosis, a condition in which a person experiences a break from reality, and later learned she had bipolar disorder. (Gomez also suffers from lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease.) She decided to take a break from her career and retreated from the spotlight. She explored different treatments, including dialectical behavior therapy, a form of talk therapy for patients experiencing intense emotional distress, eventually landing on a set of strategies and a treatment plan that worked for her.
“It was really intense for a while,” Gomez, 32, says. “I learned a lot about my mental health when I was away and took time for myself. It’s not easy. But luckily, I’m in a much healthier mindset, and I just try not to pay attention to any noise.”
As her career took off again, with critically acclaimed roles in Only Murders in the Building (produced by Hulu, which shares a parent company with National Geographic) and the musical film Emilia Pérez, she felt compelled to share her experience in a way that could help others. She did this most intimately through the 2022 documentary Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me. “I was terrified,” she says of the project, “but I didn’t want anyone else to control the narrative of my experience. I just wanted to take control of that and be honest—that always seems to be my go-to.”
She also directed profits from her cosmetics company, Rare Beauty, to create the Rare Impact Fund, a nonprofit that provides mental health resources for young people around the world. “I love what I do more than anything, but to have a purpose behind a cosmetics brand is very important,” she says. Gomez sees the cosmetics venture and its philanthropic arm as necessary complements: Without the initial funding and recognition lent by her beauty brand, Gomez’s humanitarian venture might not have received the attention it has, while the fund lends meaning to the company. “This has definitely been my pride and joy,” she says. “I just wanted to help in any way I can.”
Gomez’s mental health work is inseparable from her personal history. “I’ve had family that has experienced it, I have experienced my own mental health journey, and I’ve always been quite honest with people that I wasn’t doing OK. And I think by me being vulnerable, it opened up a window for so many people to come up to me and talk to me about their journey,” Gomez says. Even so, the gloss of celebrity had a way of softening difficult conversations. “I had been doing this for so long that I started to feel a little vain, and I didn’t think that I deserved all the compliments and the attention—it was just a lot. I wanted other people to feel like I wasn’t some unattainable thing that no one could really relate to.”
Since launching in 2020, the Rare Impact Fund has contributed millions of dollars across 30 different organizations on five continents, aiding groups focused on education, crisis response, and suicide prevention. Recipients include the Ever Forward Club in Oakland, California, which supports at-risk young men, and Kolkata Sanved, which uses dance movement therapy as a form of rehabilitation for vulnerable children in India and throughout South Asia. Elyse Cohen, Rare Impact’s president, points out that by raising awareness about these issues, Gomez is also tackling the “consistent challenge” of how to raise funds for solutions. People who haven’t personally experienced mental health struggles may now better understand the need to invest.
For the sake of her own mental health, Gomez says she will go days or weeks without checking social media but laughs as she acknowledges that achieving that level of self-control “took a long time.” Her feeds are now mostly full of recipes, cute animals, and funny videos. Still, she notes, “I’ve been working on it for years and years of rewriting my brain. I don’t feel completely even-keeled, and I’m kind of sad today or I’m anxious today. I believe in medication, and I was on the right medication that worked for me.”
She wants people to know there is help available if they need it—support that can be as private or public as they want it to be. “I don’t have it all figured out,” she says. “Once I started having a relationship with my emotions, it helped.”
