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Mariah Carey Comes Clean About Battle with Bipolar Disorder

Image: Mariah Carey Comes Clean About Battle with Bipolar Disorder

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Mariah Carey is being candid about her battle with bipolar disorder in this week’s PEOPLE cover story, where she reveals she was diagnosed in 2001 after her very public breakdown.

Carey tells PEOPLE editor in chief Jess Cagle in the cover story, “I didn’t want to believe it." She revelas she recently sought help  for her condition after the recent years of drama she endured professionally and personally.

“Until recently I lived in denial and isolation and in constant fear someone would expose me,” she says. “It was too heavy a burden to carry and I simply couldn’t do that anymore. I sought and received treatment, I put positive people around me and I got back to doing what I love — writing songs and making music.”

According to PEOPLE, Carey is in therapy and taking medication for bipolar II disorder (which involves periods of depression as well as hypomania), but Carey explains her mania was spurred on by work. 

“For a long time I thought I had a severe sleep disorder,” she told PEOPLE. “But it wasn’t normal insomnia and I wasn’t lying awake counting sheep. I was working and working and working … I was irritable and in constant fear of letting people down. It turns out that I was experiencing a form of mania. Eventually I would just hit a wall. I guess my depressive episodes were characterized by having very low energy. I would feel so lonely and sad — even guilty that I wasn’t doing what I needed to be doing for my career.”

Carey is currently back in the studio working on an album due later this year.