Katy Perry has revealed that she was severely struggling with her mental health and even felt suicidal during a tumultuous time in her life a few years ago.
During an interview with Canadian radio show "Q on CBC," the pop star said she felt depressed in 2017 following lagging album sales and her breakup from Orlando Bloom, with whom she later reconciled
"I lost my smile," Katy recalled. "I don't know if my smile was ever fully, like, authentically mine but I was riding on the high of a smile for a long time. Which was the validation, love, and admiration from the outside world, and then that shifted."
Katy said she was "wallowing" in her "own sadness" for a while.
"I had broken up with my boyfriend, who is now my baby-daddy-to-be, and then I was excited about flying high off the next record and the record didn't get me high anymore. … The validation didn't get me high, and so I just crashed," she said.
Feeling like her best was already behind her in terms of her personal and professional life "literally broke me in half," she said.
Things would certainly turn around. Now an "American Idol" judge with a baby on the way, Katy is grateful for hitting her rock bottom, calling it "necessary brokenness."
"It was so important for me to be broken so that I could find my wholeness in a whole different way. And be more dimensional than just living my life like a thirsty pop star all the time," she said. "Gratitude is probably the thing that saved my life, because if I didn't find that I would have wallowed in my own sadness and probably just jumped but I found the ways to be grateful."
In addition to "gratitude," Katy says her faith helped her get back on her feet.
"Hope has always been an option for me … because of my relationship with God and something bigger than me. If I'm the only one controlling my destiny of course it's going to be, like, I am going to drive it into the ground," she said. "My hope is that something bigger than me created me for a purpose and created me for a reason, and that I'm not disposable, and that, you know, every person that's been created has a purpose."