'Trapped in This Darkness': Christina Applegate Reveals Private Struggle With Depression, Doesn't 'Enjoy Living' Due to MS
June 4 2024, Published 2:00 p.m. ET
Christina Applegate confessed her multiple sclerosis has robbed her of being able to "enjoy living," RadarOnline.com has learned.
In an emotion interview on Tuesday's edition of Jamie-Lynn Sigler's MeSsy podcast, the actress opened up on the "real depression" of her health battle.
"I’m in a depression right now, which I don’t think I’ve felt that for years," Applegate told Sigler.
"Like a real, f----it-all depression where it’s kind of scaring me, too, a little bit because it feels really fatalistic. I’m trapped in, like, this darkness right now that I haven’t felt [in], like, I don’t even know how long, probably 20-something years."
While the podcast episode was released on June 4, the episode was recorded after the 52-year-old made a surprise appearance at the Emmy Awards in mid-January, where the Dead to Me star received a standing ovation.
Applegate called the event "the hardest day" of her life and revealed she spent the next two days sleeping.
"This is being really honest … I don’t enjoy living," Applegate confessed. "I don’t enjoy it. I don’t enjoy things anymore."
Sigler, who has battled MS for over two decades, sympathized with the struggles of living with a "disabled body," and encouraged the Anchorman star to keep going.
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"Once we get you to this place where we’re accepting that this is how it’s going to be, maybe forever …[coping with MS] is not a reason enough for you to stop living because I sit here across from you, and you still make me laugh like nobody else can," Sigler told her guest.
"You still make me smile. You make me feel loved. I can’t let you give up. I can’t. I need you to do it for me."
Applegate admitted part of the reason she was "so afraid" to go back to therapy for her depression was because she didn't want to let all of her emotions out.
"I’m so afraid for those floodgates to open and that I won’t be able to stop," Applegate shared.
Applegate, 52, was diagnosed with MS in 2021, though she revealed in a Good Morning America interview with Sigler that she likely lived with the chronic disease for "six or seven years" prior to her diagnosis.
"My symptoms had started in the early part of 2021, and it was, like, literally just tingling on my toes," Applegate said. "And by the time we started shooting in the summer of that same year, I was being brought to set in a wheelchair. Like, I couldn't walk that far."