Unless You've Been Where Demi Lovato Is, Stand Down

If I was to be completely honest, I've never been a huge fan of Demi Lovato.

Don't get me wrong. The woman's got a serious set of pipes and is an amazing singer. I admire that. What I have admired more in recent months is her outspokenness when it comes to mental health and addiction. She's been honest about the stuff she's dealt with over the last few years, and she's really become someone for young people to admire. She's someone to admire not just for her singing ability - what she's dealt with is something which no one should ever have to deal with, and yet far too many people do.

Now, she's in the hospital, recovering from an apparent overdose.

That's got to be a hell of a thing, especially for someone in her position to deal with. She's got countless fans across the globe, many of them quite young, and now she's apparently dealing with some sort of overdose. There's no way she's not giving some thought to how she might be perceived by her fanbase, never mind her own family.

As the daughter of an alcoholic, I remember waiting almost with bated breath every time my dad went through a stretch of sobriety because I knew that there would be a point where he would start drinking again. All it would take is something to upset him - something to make him mad - and he would be drinking again. I'd be disappointed, and hurt, and everything else that comes with dealing with an addict in your life.

It's almost certain that Lovato's loved ones, while they unquestionably love her and support her, are sitting in the hospital room where she's been the last couple of days and wondering how she had possibly gotten to where she now was.

The thing is, mental health and addiction are two of the most challenging health issues to deal with, and while everyone might want to apply clean answers to every situation, there aren't clean solutions when it comes to mental health and addiction. I could have told my father, for instance, to simply stop drinking, which would have been the easiest answer to the problems he was facing in coping with his addiction. However, when you're an addict, there are reasons why you are a lifelong recovering addict - there will always be the possibility of relapse, regardless of best intentions.

There are those that are trolling Lovato right now. For whatever reason, some people think it's great fun to kick others when they are down, as the saying goes. There are a number of memes and tweets openly mocking the singer's battle with addiction on her Twitter feed, and it's mindblowing that there continues to be people who seemingly wait for others to stumble so they can ridicule them.

I understand that Lovato's fame puts her in a precarious position. She's living life under a very public lens and I don't doubt that most days it can be incredibly uncomfortable to do that. Now, she's presumably still in a hospital bed, surrounded by loved ones, while the 24-hour news cycle swirls around her and thousands weigh in on social media about what actually happened.

All of that said, she's still a nearly-26-year-old woman who is struggling with very real problems. We can theorize all we like about what's happened, and the underlying causes, but at the end of the day, this is a young woman in need of ongoing recovery and support. In better times, she seemed to acknowledge that she was not a superwoman, in spite of being hailed a role model for countless individuals dealing with their own struggles with mental health and addiction.

"I'm not going to be perfect," she once said, according to New York Daily News, "but... if I can make it through the day, that's all that matters."

Unless you have been where Demi Lovato and countless other individuals have been through addiction and mental health struggles, you can't understand the private pain behind the public persona. Everyone's got a story, and mocking someone as they go through their personal battle is simply cruel.

Let's lift each other up instead of beating each other down, okay?