Colton Haynes has achieved six months of sobriety after going on a week-long bender to help cope with his divorce as well as the death of his mother in the same year. Recently, he told Attitude Magazine about his sober journey, which included four months of rehab.
Haynes’ destructive bender came after he divorced his husband of less than one year Jeff Leatham, and his mother died of cirrhosis of the liver in the same year. However, his struggles with drinking and drug use began long beforehand—as early as 2016 when he came out as gay.
“I came out, and in a way, my downward spiral started,” Haynes said. “I felt extremely free but at the same time the amount of attention I was getting was making me spin out of control.”
But he really hit bottom in 2018.
“At that point, I fell apart. My brain broke,” Haynes recalled. “I was doing a massive comedy for a studio, showed up to work and got fired on the first day. They said I looked as if I had ‘dead in my eyes’ and I did.”
He continued to spiral into darkness. “I was drowning in my own s—t,” Haynes confessed.
He hit rock bottom during his week-long bender.
“I locked myself in a hotel room at the Waldorf Astoria in Beverly Hills for seven days and was found in my room with these insane bruises all over my body,” he recounted. “It looked as if somebody had beaten the s—t out of me. I couldn’t walk, so I was falling everywhere. I almost ruptured my kidney, ended up in the hospital, ended up in 5150 psych hold. I was on such a destructive path that I could not function.”
He ended up with partial vision loss in one eye and suffered two seizures, which inspired him to seek treatment.
“I’m always going to be in recovery,” he said. “There are so many people struggling out there, but not a lot of them talk about it. Life is much more beautiful than I could have imagined.”
In the past, Haynes has revealed his struggles with mental health in his published diary entries.
