Demi Lovato's biggest revelations and reflections from “Child Star ”documentary

The "Heart Attack" singer discusses mental health, addiction, body image, bullying, and more in her directorial debut.

Demi Lovato is telling her own story.

The Camp Rock actor and pop singer, 32, (who uses she/they pronouns) reflects on their tumultuous career as a teenage entertainer in Child Star, which the performer co-directed alongside Nicola Marsh. Over the course of the 97-minute documentary — which is now streaming on Hulu — Lovato discusses her dreams, struggles, and most controversial moments as an adolescent celebrity. Here are some of Lovato's reflections and revelations from Child Star.

Lovato knew they wanted to be an entertainer from early childhood

In the doc's opening sequence, Lovato details how her family's love of Shirley Temple influenced her dreams for the future. "When I was a kid, I was so close with my great-grandparents," Lovato shares. "They had these two recliner chairs that they would sit in, and we would watch TV together. I just have this memory of Shirley Temple appearing on the TV, and I thought, 'I'm going to be the next Shirley Temple. I'm going to be the next child star. If she can do it, I can do it.' And I did."

One of Lovato's earliest outlets as a young performer came in beauty pageants — and she personally raised the funds to cover entry fees. "I remember one time you made a whole CD of like eight songs. You sang to tracks, and you sold the CDs for $10 each," Lovato's mother, Dianna De la Garza, recalls. "I went around in the neighborhood and sold my CDs so that I could raise money to be in the pageant," Lovato confirms.

Lovato faced extreme bullying when they began acting

Lovato says classmates mistreated her once she began auditioning for screen roles. "The popular girls started writing in the bathroom stalls, 'Demi's a whore,' all these nasty things," she explains. "It got to the point where by the end of the day on a Friday, I remember going to lunch and feeling like everyone was staring at me. They had signed a suicide petition saying that I should kill myself, and it was passed around and people signed it. It was so extremely hurtful.

The singer also believes that her peers' cruelty helped drive her to excel. "That was a part of my motivation to follow my dreams, because I knew it would get me out of Texas," Lovato says. "I imagined what it would be like being on Disney Channel. I was like, 'I'm gonna become so famous they can't escape my name.'"

Camp Rock was Lovato's equivalent to high school

The actor says that they "had so much fun" while making Camp Rock, the Disney Channel Original Movie starring the Jonas Brothers that put Lovato on the map in 2008. "The whole thing was so exciting," the star says. "We were all kinda just thrown into this Disney machine. We called it Disney High. You know, we were dating each other, and there [were] people that didn't like each other, and we were all the same age, and none of us were in high school, so that was our experience of it."

However, the movie also represented a dark chapter in her life. Lovato struggled with an eating disorder during production, and says that the Camp Rock press tour "definitely caused a lot of self-esteem and self-confidence issues."

Related: Demi Lovato says she wouldn’t let her kids become stars before 18, wants them to have 'the childhood I didn’t'

Lovato's musical dreams were dashed by an unenthusiastic meeting with managers

Lovato has had a successful music career as a pop star, with eight studio albums and dozens of hit singles to date. However, her enthusiasm for music waned after managers said they weren't impressed with her early songs. "Where it changed for me, was I sat down with my former management when I was 15, and they said 'Do you have any songs?'" she recalls. "And I played them five of the songs I'm most proud of, and they didn't react to them the way that I was hoping. They were like, 'Those are okay, let's get you in the studio with such-and-such artists and writers. And that to me chipped away at that raw connection to music. Obviously my ego was hurt. It chipped away at my confidence, and I never turned to music the same way again."

The singer's meteoric rise caused extensive distress

About halfway through Child Star, Lovato details how ridiculously busy they became while simultaneously juggling a music career, two Camp Rock movies, the TV show Sonny With a Chance, and other projects. "It was back to back to back to back," Lovato says. "I was a teenager, and I was just exhausted. I was being worked into the ground. We were all just kinda flopping around, figuring out how to swim."

Lovato's mother recalls one particularly concerning moment when her daughter was booked for a concert with the Jonas Brothers. "We'd had interviews and photoshoots and everything all day, and she was about to go out on stage and she said, 'I just need five minutes mom. I need five minutes. I just need to sleep,'" De la Garza remembers. "And I remember trying to wake her up, she couldn't open her eyes. And then I started crying, then she started crying, and here she's about to have to go out on stage, but it's just for me as a mom, that's when I vowed to say, 'Hey, she's proven herself now. Can we pull back a little bit? And that's all I'm asking. We're not asking not to do our job, we're just asking, 'Can we get her a little more sleep when she gets there?'"

Related: Here's why Demi Lovato sang 'Heart Attack' at AHA cardiovascular disease event

Lovato's exhaustion led to a volatile cycle of guilt and discontent. "There was one time where I was in my tour bus, and I looked out the window and there were fans chasing the bus, and they were screaming, and they were so excited that my bus was showing up to the venue," the actor says. "And I was just crying, like, I could not stop crying. Like 'Why am I living my dream and doing what I love and have these opportunities in front of me but I'm so f---ing unhappy?"

Lovato continues, "I would always feel so gross about myself. I knew that being on Disney Channel, I was in a coveted position that millions of people would trade me in a heartbeat. And I felt like I was taking it for granted. But really I was just a teenager that was struggling."

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Lovato doesn't remember some of the hardest parts of their career due to disassociation

At certain moments in her career, Lovato's mental health issues were so extreme that she no longer remembers projects she's worked on. "Camp Rock I remember a lot more than I do Camp Rock 2," Lovato explains. "Disassociation. It's like a common thread between all of us [child stars]."

While speaking with Raven-Symoné in the documentary, Lovato reveals that she forgot that they worked together on Sonny With a Chance. "When we first got on the phone to talk about this project [the doc], I was like, 'I watched you on That's So Raven, such an inspiration,'" she says. "And you were like 'Bitch, I was on your show!' and I was like 'Oh my God, she was.' It was part of my disassociation that I don't even remember so much of my show that I was on. But I do remember how difficult I was to work with because I was in so much pain and I was hurting."

Lovato later acknowledges that she was particularly unpleasant to work with during Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam and formally apologizes to her costar Alyson Stoner.

Related: Demi Lovato celebrates her new engagement: 'Here's to the rest of our lives'

Lovato didn't choose to enter rehab

The musician checked into rehab in 2010, but it wasn't their decision. "I had punched my backup dancer while on tour in South America. I got kicked off the tour basically," Lovato recalls. "And I'm on my way home, and we have a layover in Dallas, and I'm like, 'When do we land in L.A.?' It turns out that they had set up for me to go to treatment in a suburb in Chicago. It wasn't like a situation where it was like I came to the conclusion that I needed help. It was like, 'I'm getting punished, this is the end of my career, what did I just do?' And I felt so hopeless."

The musician missed her family at the height of her fame, and hopes to spend more time with them

In one of the film's most vulnerable moments, Lovato connects with her sister Madison De La Garza over a jigsaw puzzle. "I feel like I didn't see you for a few years of my life, and I feel like I didn't see anybody very much except for the people I was working with," Lovato says. "We didn't see much of each other cuz we both had our own schedules. I would love to make up for lost time even though it's been so long."

Lovato also asks De La Garza, who played Eva Longoria's daughter on Desperate Housewives, about her experience with body image. "Did you ever think — looking back on Desperate Housewives where it was so body-shaming — that we had a mom with an eating disorder, I had an eating disorder, and here you were in this position?" she asks. "I'm kind of realizing it now, but at the time, I don't think any of us truly realized that what was happening with us was an eating disorder," De La Garza responds. "I dunno, it makes me a little sad that this was something that we were all battling individually whilst standing next to each other. Especially because that was originally the focus of my role on Desperate Housewives, and eventually it became the focus of my life. And I somehow believed that I was struggling with this completely and entirely on my own, which was just not the case at all."

Lovato hopes to support the next generation of young performers

At the end of Child Star, Lovato turns the spotlight to new legislation that could help protect kids from mistreatment and exploitation in the new frontier of children's entertainment: social media. "The internet is kind of this unregulated wild wild west, and if not us, if not parents who are paying attention to this, who's gonna take care of it?" says Kristine Reeves, a representative in Washington's state legislature who's supporting a bill to secure children's privacy and control over their own image online. "[The bill] proposes that we would create accounts from folks who are basically monetizing their children on social media to ensure that those kids have the opportunity to have some compensation. The bill also focuses on ensuring that the kids have the opportunity to go to these platforms and to request that their likeness be taken down, to kind of take that power back."

Lovato also sits down with a group of kids who want to be actors alongside Chris Smith from the Looking Ahead program. She encourages them to prioritize their own health over their projects: "Obviously you wanna make a great film, TV show or commercial, but what matters is your well-being and the other things in your life, like family and friends. That's what really matters."

Child Star is now streaming on Hulu.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.