I am not a psychiatrist, and I am only speculating, but I suspect what happened to her were a series of unfortunate events that she could not control.  First of all, she had a seemingly perfect life up till a certain moment, and I think that was when she and Justin Timberlake broke up.  If you’ve never encountered defeat before, you may not know how to deal with it.  If things always go your way, you may think this is how it will always go.  No matter what happened with the relationship, I believe she didn’t know how to cope with the break up.  Many girls don’t, and I applaud Selena Gomez for seeking out treatment after her break-up.  We are not taught coping skills after such an event, and it can spark the moment we spiral out of control because we don’t know how to express our feelings.  And there is a stigma attached with it because people perceive you as weak because you need help.  However, if we don’t know how to heal ourselves, we continue to carry this trauma into every aspect of our lives.

On top of that, she had carefully crafted a public image of herself based on always appearing perfectly poised and happy.  How can you reconcile the two if this is how you grew up?  How do you separate the public persona from the private when you are so young?  Because she couldn’t express herself, she started on a path of self-destructive behavior that resulted in privileges being removed from her.  When they were removed, she was relegated to the role of a child.  When you lose all control, you retreat further into yourself, but at the same time, you engage in self-destructive behavior because these are cries for help.  When someone is hurting themselves this much, they are showing the turmoil they have inside, but many on the outside do not understand this and only characterize the person by their actions and not their feelings.

And that is how we as a society judge people we know nothing of.  You certainly don’t have to like everyone on the face of the earth, but with a little more understanding, you can understand how they came to be exactly where they are.