Katy Perry ‘grateful’ she stayed away from drugs during mental health battle

Katy Perry is "so grateful" she didn’t turn to drugs when she was suffering with her mental health.
The 35-year-old singer endured a battle with depression after her 2017 album ‘Witness’ failed to gain critical acclaim, and has said going on a mental health "journey" over the last few years has helped her stay away from treating her depression with prescription medication.
She said: "I’m so grateful I’m not a drug addict. I went on a journey to adopt some good tools so I didn’t have to lean so far into pharma.
"There were some pretty dark days and I think that was pretty evident on my last record and what I was going through publicly."
Katy now uses "mediation" and "childhood trauma therapy" as "tools" to help her handle her mental health.
And the ‘Daisies’ hitmaker also credits her fiancé Orlando Bloom – with whom she is expecting her first child – with helping her get back on her feet.
Speaking to Australia’s Daily Telegraph’s ‘JMO’ podcast, she said: "Orlando is like a sage. When we first met, he said we would pull the poison out of each other, and we really do. It’s exhausting, but we really hold each other accountable."
Meanwhile, Katy recently spoke about going on an "emotional, spiritual, psychological journey" to help her come to terms with criticism.
The ‘Never Worn White’ singer explained: "I had to go to some pretty dark places and face a lot of things I didn’t want to face. And that’s been a process for me for about two and a half years. I did some heavy, emotional, psychological lifting.
"It was unstable times because I was this girl that was all self-love. It was easy for me to say that when I had such admiration coming from the outside and then, when I didn’t get the same type of admiration or my life kind of shifted, even by a degree professionally, it was like a big seismic shift.
"The rollercoaster had only ever been up. And if you navigate a boat a degree different, you land on a different continent. It may not have been that big to everyone else. But to me it was like, ‘Oh God, this is intense.’ I basically had the rug of validation pulled from underneath me. And that was necessary to really go on this emotional, spiritual, psychological journey that I went through."