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Often times, it’s the funniest people who have the darkest stories. We’ve seen that time and time again with comedians. And while Jamie Foxx has always appeared to be pretty well adjusted, in a recent interview, the actor, musician and comedian shared that he has endured his share of dark days.
During a recent interview with Hip Hollywood, Jamie Foxx opened up about his own episode dealing with depression, substance abuse and a mental episode. It was in response to what is currently going on with his friend Kanye West.
Jamie said,
“I know Kanye don’t come from a bad place. And when he talked about the drugs, the mental drugs, I’ve had an episode of that. When he was talking about I went in for two pills and they gave seven pills, that’s real. And when that was happening, I was lucky enough to have people like my sister, like my family that said, ‘Yo, you can’t go out right now because you’re talking crazy.’ Because in my situation, I thought everybody had renamed everything in the world. This was a donkey. This was Nicaragua. Whatever it was.
But here’s the thing. look at the difference in the interview with TMZ and Charlamagne. Charlamagne recognized my man was in a place. So Charlamagne’s interview was different. He took care of my guy even though he knew my guy was way somewhere else.”
BlackDoctor provided more context for the story, which Foxx first shared back in 2009.
Foxx admitted that early on in his career, he used alcohol as a coping mechanism. “I was in a bad place because I felt like I might be literally losing my mind. I’ve always had a childhood fear of losing my mind. I needed someone to help bring me out of it.”
As a result, Foxx sought help from a psychiatrist who was able to get to the root cause of his fear. The psychiatrist helped him trace his fear of mental illness back to an incident that took place when he was 18-years-old. He was at a college party when his drink was spiked with an hallucinogenic drug (PCP or phencyclidine) at a college party.
He recalls a party in his dorm where he was drinking a glass of whiskey when all of a sudden he felt “terrible—the room was moving, the faces of the other people were contorted.” Someone gave him the drug as a practical joke.
“I know who it was, but he wasn’t a friend. I was drinking whisky and it didn’t taste funny so I had no idea. It took about 15 minutes and I knew something was wrong. I said to my roommate, ‘Something is going on, and I don’t know what it is, but I’m going to ride it out.’ That was the last thing I said, and then I was almost in a coma and I couldn’t move, couldn’t talk, couldn’t even say, ‘Take me to the hospital.’ My friend could see something was badly wrong and he took me to the emergency room.’”
Foxx was traumatized by the incident.
Another friend of his, Mark Provart “stayed at the hospital with me. Then he took me back to the dorm and I was afraid of the dark and he would talk to me every night and calm me down and say stuff like, You’re OK, the demons aren’t real. He saved my life.”
Foxx suffered flashbacks immediately after the incident for 11 months and then had more years later.
“I read up on PCP after it happened. It leaves a fingerprint and you can’t get it out of your system. It happened to me when I was 18 and I had 11 months of harsh flashbacks, and then when I was 26 I had a flashback just like that (snaps his fingers) – and another one when I was 32, and that was the last one, but I always worry about it coming back. “How did it make me feel? Like living in your worst nightmares. You’re afraid of the dark, afraid of things you see on the television, you feel that things are coming at you. I felt paranoid, and paranoia is craziness. It’s not good.”
You can watch the most recent interview with Hip Hollywood below.
