Paris Jackson is opening up about her lowest lows.
On the latest installment of her Facebook Watch series, Unfiltered: Paris Jackson and Gabriel Glenn, the 22-year-old admitted to cutting herself and attempting suicide “many times” after the death of her father Michael Jackson in 2009 — and it evolved from another addictive behavior she developed at the time: over-eating.
In the episode, the actress recalled gaining weight when she moved in with her grandmother, Katherine, following MJ’s death. Suddenly, she was allowed to eat more sugary foods — like soda and cakes — and her body changed because of it.
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She remembered:
“I gained a lot of weight and it [eating] became an addiction… and then a cousin called me fat so I was like, ‘OK, I can’t do that anymore.’ And that’s how I fell into self-harm.”
She continued:
“I would cut and burn myself. I never thought that I would die from it because I was always in control of the razor and I knew how deep I was going… Part of it was the dopamine release. Dopamine is called dope for a reason: it feels good.”
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Jackson explained that, like any kind of addiction, harming herself felt like a “distraction” from her “emotional pain,” adding:
“Things like food and sex and drugs and music and working out… there’s a lot of things that cause a dopamine release… Self harm was one of them, tattoos was one of them and so there was that and then also it was a distraction from emotional pain and transferring to physical pain and the need for control.”
But eventually, the budding starlet wanted a permanent distraction from the emotional pain. She told cameras:
“Yes, I tried to kill myself many times.”
Paris tried to commit suicide in 2013 when she was 15 by slitting her wrist and attempting to overdose on painkillers. Thankfully, she survived and was sent to a therapeutic boarding school in Utah throughout her sophomore year of highschool and half of her junior year.
Revealing she “didn’t have a choice” but to go to the school, the singer shared:
“I was underage. CPS said they would take me if I wasn’t sent there… The problems I went in there with got fixed but I left there with way more problems than I came in with.”
These days, Paris is trying to manage her depression — which she says “comes in waves” — without taking antidepressants and mood stabilizers. She said of the medication:
“It just kind of clouded my third eye. I couldn’t laugh as deeply… You can’t numb the bad without numbing the good… So even though the lows are unbearably low, I would still rather that than nothing. Pain is way better than just [being] numb because at least you’re feeling something.”
Pain is universal. There’s no escaping it — but we hope Paris has a support system just in case things get hard to manage again.
[Image via Paris Jackson/Instagram]
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