Thursday in LA, Demi Lovato appeared in a mental health summit organized by Hollywood & Mind — a company that works to leverage the power of entertainment to help the world’s mental health crisis — and discussed her bipolar diagnosis and how it changed her life.

“I’ve been through so much. I’ve had struggles and I never wanted to have secrets. … That is part of the reason why I’ve decided to be open about my challenges,” she told Hollywood & Mind founder Cathy Applefeld Olson. “I wanted to be honest with my fans because I knew that if someone was struggling that they could use that honesty as a source of inspiration.”

According to People, Demi also spoke about how “relieved” she was to receive her diagnosis, which she first shared in 2011.

“I had spent so many years struggling, and I didn’t know why I was a certain way in dealing with depression at such extreme lows, when I seemingly had the world in front of me just ripe with opportunities,” she continued.

“It was things like, I remember being 15 years old on a tour bus, and watching fans follow my bus with posters and trying to get me to wave outside the window,” she recalled. “And all I could do was just sit there and cry.”

“And I remember being in the back of my tour bus watching my fans and crying and being like, ‘Why am I so unhappy?'”

Demi also revealed, according to Billboard, that ignoring Instagram comments, even the positive ones, helps her mental health.

“If I see something negative, it’s going to hurt my feelings, and if I see something positive, it’s going to feed into that outside validation that I’ve worked so hard to not need,” she explained.

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