When it comes to therapy, some people may choose to visit professional doctors. For others, they listen to brand-new Taylor Swift music.
On Friday, April 19, the Grammy winner released her 11th studio album titled The Tortured Poets Department. While some of the music and lyrics are focused on past loves like Matty Healy and Joe Alwyn, Swift’s latest body of work also explores mental health and the various emotions one may face through the ups and downs of life.
In the track “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” Swift, 34, sings about unrequited love and the toll it could take on one’s mind — especially as they hit the stage every night on a sold-out world tour as she did in the aftermath of her split from Alwyn.
“I’m so depressed, I act like it’s my birthday every day / I’m so obsessed with him, but he avoids me like the plague,” she sings. “I cry a lot, but I am so productive, it’s an art / You know you’re good when you can even do it with a broken heart.”
Swift also explores the pain of being ghosted by a guy (seemingly Healy) in the song “Down Bad.”
“Now I’m down bad, cryin’ at the gym / Everything comes out teenage petulance,” she sings. “F— it if I can’t have him / I might just die, it would make no difference.”
With heavy lyrics up for interpretation, some may wonder what Swift has shared about her own mental health. Soon after the double album’s release, fans remembered an interview Swift did with Rolling Stone where she discussed her thoughts on therapy.
“I’ve never been to therapy,” she told the publication in September 2019. “I talk to my mom a lot, because my mom is the one who’s seen everything. God, it takes so long to download somebody on the last 29 years of my life, and my mom has seen it all. She knows exactly where I’m coming from. And we talk endlessly.”
Swift continued, “There were times when I used to have really, really, really bad days where we would just be on the phone for hours and hours and hours. I’d write something that I wanted to say, and instead of posting it, I’d just read it to her.”
In a separate interview with Rolling Stone from 2012, Swift reiterated she’s never been to therapy saying, “I just feel very sane.”
TTPD isn’t the first time Swift has explored mental health topics. When “Red (Taylor’s Version)“ was released in 2021, some fans speculated her lyrics in “Forever Winter” were about an experience processing the death of a friend by suicide.
“If I was standing there in your apartment / I’d take that bomb in your head and disarm it,” she sings. “I’d say I love you even at your darkest and / Please don’t go.”
In the 2020 album folklore, Swift also included powerful imagery in “This Is Me Tryin” when she sings, “Pulled the car off the road to the lookout / Could’ve followed my fears all the way down.”
Just days before the release of TTPD, Swift partnered with Apple Music to unveil five exclusive playlists featuring songs from her discography that represent the stages of heartbreak: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.
According to Swift, the depression playlist, which is titled “Old Habits Die Screaming,” explores “the feelings of depression that often lace their way” through her catalog.
“In times like these, I’ll write a song because I feel lonely or hopeless. And writing a song feels like the only way to process that intensity of an emotion,” Swift continued. “And while these things are really, really hard to go through, I often feel like when I’m either listening to songs or writing songs that deal with this intensity of loss and hopelessness, usually that’s in the phase where I’m close to getting past that feeling.”
