In December 2016, Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. And on an episode of the WTF With Marc Maron podcast released on Monday, he got candid about that diagnosis.
First, the comedian relayed to Maron that he initially believed smoking marijuana was the issue. "I've been a pothead forever," Davidson said, according to Rolling Stone. "Around October [or] September last year, I started having mental breakdowns where I would, like, freak out and then not remember what happened after. Blind rage. I never really did any other drugs, so I was like, 'I'm gonna try to go to rehab. Maybe that’ll be helpful.'"
From that point, he says he stopped smoking, but that doctors figured there might be a bigger problem behind his behavior.
"They told me there, they're like, 'You might be bipolar,' and I was like, 'OK,'" he said. "So they're like, 'We're gonna try you on these meds.' And then I got out [of rehab], and then I started smoking weed again—and I'm on meds."
However, two months after that, Davidson reports he "had a really bad mental breakdown," which resulted in a public announcement via an Instagram post that he'd try to quit "drugs," (meaning weed) as he still believed it was the source of his woes. As Pete stated to Maron while thinking back to that now deleted post: "I should've just said, 'I’m quitting weed,' because now people think I do drugs. I'm very embarrassed at this point."
Though he did quit, three months later he still felt the same, at which point a psychiatrist formally diagnosed him with BPD and gave him a prescription to help treat that.
"It is working, slowly but surely," he relayed. "I've been having a lot of problems. This whole year has been a fucking nightmare. This has been the worst year of my life, getting diagnosed with this and trying to figure out how to learn with this and live with this."
If you want, you can listen to the whole podcast here.
