Dr. Drew Discusses Chyna’s Mental Problems

As part of the Documenting Chyna interview series on The Wrestling Inc. Daily, Dr. Drew discussed the severity of Chyna’s mental health issues, the circumstances that led to her death, and much more. You can read his comments below:

Dr. Drew on Chyna’s mental health issues: “I think the important thing to remember is she spent a over a month, maybe several months I could never quite put it together, in a locked psychiatric hospital. There was something terribly wrong psychiatrically. I don’t know if it was all addiction. I don’t know if she became psychotic, but you don’t put someone, I mean here you could never even do it, but even in a place like Japan, you don’t just spend months in a locked psychiatric facility because you’re a little depressed or that you were suicidal at one time. So something substantial was going on psychiatrically, which is why when they called me, I just kept saying, look, you got to get a psychiatrist. You got to have somebody evaluate her. Something is not right. I don’t know what’s going on, but don’t worry about the mom and all the things you want to do. That’s all great, but I need to understand what’s going on here, and the last I kind of talked to them, as I recall, I got them referred to the psychiatrist, and I think that she saw him. But I don’t know what happened. It was out of my hands at that point.”

On Chyna potentially dealing with dissociative disorder: “She seemed to have some sort of dissociative disorder, and she clearly had been traumatized. I mean, there were times — she never had a formal diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder, but I worried about that because her presentation was so different in so many different environments, like it was a different person, and when I would talk to her about some of her traumatic past, which again, when people have these traumatic pasts, you never know what’s a memory and what’s really happened, but what’s important is that they’re struggling with these things.

“And in her case, she was highly dissociative. She was just constantly highly dissociative from her feelings and memories and things, and a lovely human being. I mean, the version of her that I got to know was quite sweet, but I always had grave concerns. I sent her to a psychologist. She wouldn’t go on in the addiction treatment. I sent her to a psychologist. She saw him a few times but never really followed through. She never wanted to cop to the substances, and she never really wanted to get involved in the mental health care. She never really wanted to really dig into the process, and then of course, the drug addiction part of it would became much more prominent later on.”

On how excessive prescribing of opiates led to Chyna’s passing: “This is another catastrophe of the excessive prescribing of opiates by my peers. My patients died, almost exclusively, as a result of doctors overprescribing opiates to drug addicts, and she, and Jeff Conway and Mike Starr, every single one of them died with a couple pills, bottles of benzodiazepines opiates at their bedside that they never should have been prescribed under any circumstances. Today, that would not happen. Today, the prescribing is being scrutinized, but then, if you were an addict, your life was in danger if you went to see a doctor, and that was happening hand over fist. And I couldn’t stop it no matter what I did. It was a terrible time, heartbreaking. I’m pacing right now as I’m telling you this because I cannot tell you how horrible it was.

“I would treat people. I’d get them well. They have no more pain, and they’d go see their pain doctor or their Orthopedic or whatever. And literally, things were said to them like, ‘When are you going to stop listening to those people that are trying to brainwash you? I know what you need. You need to be on these medicines all the time.’ You say that to a drug addict. They’re done. It’s over, and that’s how they were dying constantly, heartbreaking. It’s reprehensible, disgusting, but that’s what I was dealing with the time, and by the way, I suffered through 10 years of people telling me that I was interested in people suffering, that I didn’t care if people are in pain [or] that I was old-fashioned.”