Health
Manson is asthmatic. She quit smoking in the early 1990s, when she was around the age of 25. In 1998, Manson had a benign tumor removed from her breast. After the surgery, which she said was "really botched" and left her "in a lot of pain", she kept on touring wearing a sling.
During the Beautiful Garbage tour, Manson started having trouble with her voice, losing her voice completely at the Roskilde Festival, in Denmark, on 30 June 2002: "I got on stage and opened my mouth to sing, and about 30 seconds in, there was no voice at all. It was a fucking nightmare," she recounted Spin magazine in 2005. Believing it was due to fatigue or stress, she kept on touring until Gwen Stefani pointed her towards a vocal specialist, who diagnosed her with "a large-sized cyst on one of my vocal cords, which was also causing considerable damage to the vocal cord opposite." A specialist informed Manson the operation could damage her singing ability permanently, so initially she desisted. She underwent surgery in 2003 after seeing another doctor in New York and recuperated her voice after three weeks of rehabilitation, including a week of total silence. Manson described the experience as "torture": "speech is my absolute lifeline and I felt like I'd lost my personality, been stripped completely of me… I felt invisible," she explained.
At the first date of the Garbage tour promoting Strange Little Birds, whilst singing "Special", Manson fell off the stage into the pit at KROQ Weenie Roast on 14 May 2016. She immediately stood back up, apparently unhurt, and continued performing for the rest of the set. In November 2022, she said she injured her right hip in the incident, causing her "so much pain" and requiring hip replacement surgery, which took place on 16 January 2023 at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
Manson has spoken publicly on several occasions about experiencing body dysmorphic disorder and depression, exacerbated by the media scrutiny and misogyny she encountered during Garbage's breakthrough years. She received psychiatric help on the advice of her trainer during the making of Garbage's third album Beautiful Garbage whilst also going through a divorce, a time when she was admittedly "crying literally for like four hours in the bathtub every night." She said the psychiatrist she went to "saved [her] life" and taught her "how to turn all the noise down and allow a healthier voice to emerge. Start to make sense of the world and start to control how you respond to it."
Manson has admitted she has learnt to manage her struggles with time, saying "it's a constant dialogue, and you just learn to be more powerful than that other voice." She also credited her photo shoot with no make up on for Calvin Klein, in 1999, to have helped considerably in facing her own perception of herself. "If everyone had seen me with no make-up on, there was nothing to hide. And, I like the photograph. I looked… sweet. I actually wrote to Calvin Klein telling him that he'd done something incredible for me" she told Glamour magazine in 2001.
Manson has spoken of her aversion to resorting to cosmetic surgery, stating that it wouldn't solve her body dysmorphia: "I know that even if I did get something fixed it is not going to last very long and I am still going to be back to square one, and I'm going to have to face myself in the morning", she told The Herald in 2008. She also added "I don't want to set an example for the younger generation of women who come up and think they have to fix their faces. I don't want to pass that on to other girls. I don't want to be responsible for that."
Manson has also spoken openly about struggling with self-harm. In 2018, she wrote an article on self-harm for The New York Times called "The First Time I Cut Myself", in which she detailed the experience of cutting for the first time when she was thirteen years old whilst in an unhealthy relationship. She said the self-harming lasted up until she was fifteen, although she has felt the impulse to cut again during the Version 2.0 tour due to the media pressure, an urge she resisted. Manson admitted not knowing to this day the reason behind her self-harming, "but I'm sure there was a lot of unexpressed anger, a lot of hormones, and a lot of emotions that I was unable to process as a young person", she explained.
