Selena Gomez’s mom feared she would ‘die’

Selena Gomez’s mother, Mandy Teefey, was scared for her daughter’s life the moment she learned the popstar was having a mental breakdown during her 2016 Revival tour. 

“We heard about her mental breakdown through TMZ. They called me and wanted to know what my daughter was doing in the hospital with a nervous breakdown,” Teefey recalls in Gomez’s forthcoming Apple TV+ documentary, “My Mind & Me,” out Friday. “She didn’t want anything to do with me and I was scared she was going to die.” 

Gomez, 30, who has been working as a child star since she was 7, shares a raw and rare glimpse into her battle with mental health struggles, a lupus-induced kidney transplant and a bipolar diagnosis in the forthcoming documentary, filmed over the course of six years by “Truth or Dare” director Alek Keshishian. 

“Let me make a promise. I’ll only tell you my darkest secrets,” Gomez says in a voiceover  reading from her diary. She delivers within the first half hour. An early scene from 2016 shows the singer grappling with body image issues while rehearsing for her Revival World tour, lamenting that she doesn’t want to look like a “12-year-old boy” moments before the camera pans on her performing her self-acceptance hit “Who Says.” Viewers watch the singer spiral deeper into self-confidence issues about her performance. 

“The pressure is just overwhelming because I want to do the best I can,” Gomez says, hysterically crying. Moments later, she asks: “ When am I going to just be good enough by myself? When am I going to be good just by myself not needing anybody to be associated with,” referring to her duet with ex Justin Bieber. 

After 55 performances, Gomez canceled her Revival tour amidst issues with anxiety, panic attacks and depression. Rumors swirled that she had a drug problem. 

“At one point she’s like, ‘I don’t want to be alive right now. I don’t want to live,’” Gomez’s former assistant, Theresa Mingus, who worked with the star between 2014 and 2018 according to her LinkedIn profile, says in the doc. 

“It was one of those moments where you look in her eyes and there’s nothing there. It was just pitch black. And it’s so scary. You’re like okay, f—k this. This needs to end, we need to go home,” she says. 

Gomez’s mother was gutted when her daughter sought treatment at a mental health facility. 

“You hang on as tight as you can and try to help them with their treatment and that’s the hardest thing to do. To then just go to bed and hope that they wake up the next day,” she says. 

In another voice-over diary entry, Gomez sadly confesses: “My thoughts take over my mind often. It hurts when I think about my past. I want to know how to breathe again. Do I love my own self?” 

Gomez’s health struggles go as far back as 2014, when she initially sought treatment at a rehab facility in Arizona for her lupus diagnosis. In 2016, she went to rehab again for anxiety and depression in Tennessee amid her Revival World Tour, prompting her to cancel the remaining tour dates. A year later, she had a kidney transplant from her best friend, Gomez revealed. Still grappling with her mental health following her transplant, Gomez sought therapy again in 2018 and later that year, she was hospitalized following a low white blood count.

After a hiatus from performing, the documentary picks up with Gomez in 2019 when she reveals she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. 

“I’m going to be honest, I didn’t want to go to a mental health hospital,” she says. “I didn’t want to. But I didn’t want to be trapped in myself, in my mind anymore. I thought my life was over. I was like, ‘This is how I’m going to be forever.”