Katy Perry Got Real About How Fame & Success Affected Her Mental Health

For Katy Perry fans, the singer's larger-than-life personality is just another reason to love her. Perry has a bright and energetic disposition, but her outside appearance hasn't always reflected the way she feels on the inside. Katy Perry's quotes about how her success affected her mental health are so raw.

During an interview on Canadian radio show Q on CBC on Friday, June 26, Perry opened up about how she "lost" her smile in 2017 after years of believing she was happy because she had validation from everyone but herself.

"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," Perry explained. "Which was the validation, love, and admiration from the outside world, and then that shifted."

The rough patch was a combination of Perry's breakup with now-fiancé Orlando Bloom and the public's less-than-enthusiastic response to her 2017 album Witness.

"My career was on this trajectory where it was going up-up-up-up-up-up-up, and then I had the smallest shift; it wasn't that huge, maybe, from an outside perspective, but for me it was seismic," she said. "It literally kind of broke me in half. I think I had broken up with my boyfriend, who's 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."

Perry calls her experience with mental health a "necessary brokenness" that ultimately led to her learning to put herself, rather than validation of her career, first.

"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," Perry 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."

If you or someone you know is seeking help for mental health concerns, visit the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) website, or call 1-800-950-NAMI(6264). For confidential treatment referrals, visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) website, or call the National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP(4357). In an emergency, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK(8255) or call 911.