You never know what goes on behind closed doors.
Kathy Griffin outlined to ABC the dire personal straits she found herself in while on tour in 2017, including battling an addiction to prescription drugs.
During the “Laugh Your Head Off” tour following her controversial photoshoot with Tyler Shields that showed her with a severed Donald Trump head, the 60-year-old comedian said she lost “a ton of weight” and was prescribed a number of pills, starting with Provigil, a stimulant meant to treat sleep disorders like narcolepsy.
The “My Life on the D-List” star admitted she “fell in love” with the pills she was taking — which also included Ambien and painkillers — and things “got out of control very rapidly.”
“I thought, ‘Well, I don’t even drink… Big deal, I take a couple pills now and again, who doesn’t?’” she explained, adding, “Trust me… I was laughing to stay alive. And what I found is I felt like, if I can’t make others laugh, then there’s no purpose for me to live. There’s no reason for me to live.”
Griffin, who was recently diagnosed with lung cancer, said she was receiving death threats as part of the photoshoot backlash, as were other members of her family.
“I mean, legit death threats with everything, from online, which [had] the Google pictures of the house, the address,” Griffin said. “I mean, folks showed up to my husband’s parents’ house. They tracked my sister down when she was dying of cancer in the hospital and called her … I picked up the call and heard it myself because I happened to be visiting her.”
Griffin hit a breaking point in early 2020 and her thoughts of suicide became “obsessive.”
“I started really convincing myself it was a good decision,” the comedian said. “I got my living revocable trust in order. I had all my ducks in a row. I wrote the note — the whole thing.”
Griffin now credits her husband, Randy Bick, for helping her get clean. She was admitted to a hospital and put on a psychiatric hold before being released and working with two clinicians to recover from the pill addiction. She was hospitalized again in March 2020 with “unbearably painful” Covid-like symptoms, but was unable to be tested due to restrictions.
“The irony is not lost on me that, a little over a year ago, all I wanted to do was die,” Griffin said. “And now, all I wanna do is live.”
If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or text Crisis Text Line at 741741