Paris Jackson recently spoke candidly about her history with mental health and addiction, revealing there were several moments when she nearly gave up completely.
Appearing on Jay Shetty’s podcast, On Purpose, Jackson revealed her first suicide attempt occurred at age 15, a year after she began using drugs and alcohol.
”If it goes on for long enough, it becomes unbearable,” Jackson said.
Paris’s family—who raised her, Prince, and Blanket after their father Michael Jackson died in 2009—sent her to a Utah treatment facility. She explained that the move was more damaging than helpful following 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… And 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.”
Several years later, Jackson again attempted to take her life after going “cold turkey” from heroin. She was still “drinking, snorting cocaine, and smoking weed.” For many weeks, she only slept “an hour or two a night,” which led to “a suicide attempt that didn’t work.”
“I feel like that should have worked,” said Jackson. “That was one of the first attempts where I’m like, ‘F—, it didn’t work.’”
“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 worried about the outcome if she survived.
“I’m gonna end up, like, kind of paralyzed. “And I would just think of all these ideas and then how it would go wrong, and I’m like, ‘I’m stuck here,‘” Jackson said.
Now, she believes she has the tools to persevere, although the singer is aware that her mental health is an ongoing journey.
“I think happiness is temporary. I think pain is temporary,” she explained. “And so, knowing that I may get sad again,” Jackson explained. “I may go through a dark time again; hopefully, I will be bringing the information with me this time of ‘there is a way out. You’ve done it before. And you will do it again.’”