Hayden Panettiere’s battle with addiction as actress dies at 36
Hayden Panettiere had shared candid details of the toll that addiction took on her health before her tragic death on Sunday at age 36.
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No official cause of death has been named for the “Nashville” star, but in recent years, she reflected on her battle with addiction to alcohol and opioids.
At one point, it grew so serious that she developed jaundice, a condition in which the skin and whites of the eyes turn yellow due to poor liver function.
“Doctors told me my liver was going to give out,” she told People in 2022, later elaborating in her memoir: “A doctor told me that if I didn’t stop drinking, I’d be dead within five years.”
Panettiere said the door to addiction was opened for her as a teenager, when someone on her team began giving her “happy pills” before red carpets.
“They were to make me peppy during interviews,” she said.
She later started abusing alcohol after moving to Tennessee to star in the hit series “Nashville” in 2012.
“I was being told how to be and how to live by so many people in my life,” she told Women’s Health UK in 2023. “I wanted certain decisions to be my own, and nobody could stop me. What I put in my body was like an act of defiance.”
The actress, who battled postpartum depression, said that her drinking “ramped up” following the birth of her daughter, Kaya, in 2014.
“I never heard any stories about it at all,” she told E! News’ The Rundown in 2023. “I just thought there was something seriously wrong with me, so I thought, ‘[Alcohol] will fix this. Duh!’ And it didn’t. It does for a moment, but then it made everything worse.”
Compounding the problem, Panettiere was also prescribed opioids after an “old neck injury flared up.” She said she quickly developed a dependency on the pain pills and that her “tolerance got so high, so fast, that it became a problem.”
The actress checked herself into rehab for the first time in 2015, saying she felt as if she was “drowning.”
Unfortunately, she later relapsed, saying that alcohol became a crutch that helped ease anxiety and the pressures of being in the public eye.
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“I [also] struggled with sleep deprivation,” she said. “Sleep is massive. It affects your motor skills, your ability to think, and your overall health.”
At her lowest point, she said, “I would have the shakes when I woke up and could only function with sipping alcohol.”
Her issues progressed, and she started seeing the serious physical side effects following her 30th birthday in 2019.
“My body was like, ‘Enough,’” she confessed. “I hit 30. My face was swollen. I had jaundice. My eyes were yellow. I had to go to a liver specialist. I was holding on to weight that wasn’t normally there. My hair was thin and coming out in clumps.”
Panettiere sought further treatment, including an eight-month treatment program. It wasn’t easy — especially going through withdrawal.
“As my nervous system tried to regulate itself without the depressant effects of alcohol, it went into overdrive, and my whole body shook,” she recalled in her memoir, “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” which was published earlier this year.
“Once during withdrawal, I heard voices that were so terrifying I got on all fours and crawled to my bathroom, where I lay on the cool, clean tiles and waited for the panic to pass,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep, and my head pounded like it was pressing against my skull.”
But, she said, she did “a lot of work on myself” during the program.
On Sunday night, “Remember the Titans” star was found by a friend who told 911 that she was unconscious from an apparent cardiac arrest, according to police sources.
The friend called 911 at 1:51 p.m. Sunday from a Greenville, SC, apartment to report an “unresponsive female” in “cardiac arrest,” TMZ reported.
Responding paramedics tried to resuscitate her with “advanced cardiac life support,” which can include breathing tubes, defibrillators, and emergency medication such as IV drugs.
She was pronounced dead at 2:32 p.m., five days before her 37th birthday.
