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Credit: DisneyThe former Disney Channel alumnus was told not to seek treatment by an unnamed member of her team.
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30-year-old Demi Lovato has opened up recently about her struggles with her eating disorder and drug addiction, in the podcast Call Her Daddy with Alice Cooper.
The young actor, songwriter, and singer made her big break working for The Walt Disney Company back in the 2000s and 2010s, starring in several Disney Channel Original franchises such as the Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM) Camp Rock (2008) and its sequel Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam (2010) as Mitchie Torres, alongside the Jonas Brothers, Joe Jonas (Shane Gray), Nick Jonas (Nate Gray) and Kevin Jonas (Jason Gray). She also starred as the titular character Sonny Munroe on Sonny with a Chance (2009-2011), before venturing further into the music scene and earning herself platinum-certified singles and several accolades.
Lately, Demi Lovato has been particularly frank about her past, recently making allegations that she was the victim of rape during her Disney days.
Having started abusing substances at the young age of 13, Lovato had begun experimenting with opiates after being prescribed them after her involvement in a car accident. She would steal her mother’s Xanax pills at age 15-16, and by 17 she had tried cocaine and “loved it so much”, which was happening more or less around the time her breakthrough DCOM, Camp Rock was released.
Lovato recalls from her youth, and the beginning of her struggles with addiction:
My mom didn’t think she’d have to lock up the opiates from her 13-year-old daughter, but I was already drinking at that point.
Related: Disney Channel Star Demi Lovato Officially Replaced In New Series
Now, the singer has revealed that during a dark period of her life in 2017, she had relayed to an unnamed member of her team that she was “throwing up blood”, before being told she wasn’t “sick enough” to seek treatment.
Lovato says of the incident:
I think that was his way of saying, ‘No, you’re not going back to treatment because if you do, this will look bad on me.
The life that Lovato had led while working at Disney did not do the young, aspiring actor any favors, as the end of Camp Rock was when she sought treatment for addiction at the age of 18.
She was battling with her eating disorder throughout her whole time at Disney, as Lovato recalls a particularly bad stint where she would binge and purge, even sneaking out of her hotel room after management removed the phones to prevent her calling room service. Her team later barricaded the hotel room door with furniture.
I didn’t have food in my hotel room, like, snacks in the mini bar, because they didn’t want me to eat the snacks… It was that level of controlling when it came to my food, which just made my eating disorder worse.
The Disney Channel’s Sonny with a Chance ended in 2011, when Lovato announced a hiatus from acting.
Lovato’s early 20s was when she relapsed on both drugs and alcohol, in order to escape from the tough situations in her life. She now claims that she’s “learned a lot from that experience”, and doesn’t intend to return to that way of living any more:
They always said, ‘If you use, you’re out,’ and I was like, ‘Alright, time to get out, bye’… No one can control me anymore.
It definitely seems that Demi Lovato wants full control of her life back.
What do you think of Demi Lovato being told not to seek treatment after “throwing up blood”? Sound off in the comments below!
