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Paris Jackson has been candid about her battles with mental health and addiction, and in a new interview, she admits she nearly gave up the fight altogether “quite a few times.”
The singer’s first suicide attempt came at the age of 15, about a year after she began experimenting with drugs and alcohol. Substance abuse compounded by “untreated mental illness” was a dangerous combination, she explained on Jay Shetty’s podcast, On Purpose. “If it goes on for long enough, it becomes unbearable.”
On the advice of Child Protective Services, she was sent to a treatment center by her family, who were raising Paris and her brothers Prince and Blanket following their father Michael Jackson’s 2009 death. But the facility, located in Utah, did more harm than good.
After nearly two years of treatment, “I definitely left with more PTSD than I went in there with,” Jackson revealed. “[I] had nightmares for two or three years about going back… I was one of the lucky ones where we didn’t experience physical or sexual abuse, but there was definitely a lot of psychological, emotional, spiritual abuse that happened there.”
A few years later, she tried again to take her life after going “cold turkey” from heroin, while still drinking, snorting cocaine, and smoking weed. For weeks, she only slept an hour or two a night, culminating in “a suicide attempt that didn’t work,” much to her dismay.
Jackson had washed down an entire bottle of benzos with “an entire bottle of vodka,” she recalled to Shetty. “I feel like that should have worked.” She awoke four hours later, and “that was one of the first attempts where I’m like, ‘F---, it didn’t work.’”
Weeks later, she had “a proper rock bottom” with alcohol that scared her into getting sober. But the dark thoughts didn’t magically disappear.
“For a long time, [I] went back and forth between this place of ‘I can’t be here anymore,’ and ‘Well, it’s not my time, so I’m stuck here,’” she recalled. “And I can try all of these methods, but they’re still not gonna work.”
Jackson considered hanging herself, but feared if that too didn’t work, “I’m gonna end up, like, kind of paralyzed. I would just think of all of these ideas and then how it would go wrong, and I’m like, ‘I’m stuck here.’”
