SNL's Pete Davidson Says He Has Borderline Personality Disorder

In an interview on Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast, Saturday Night Live cast member Pete Davidson talked about being in rehab for marijuana use and revealed he was recently diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

Davidson, 23, has been open about using marijuana before, both to help his Crohn’s disease and recreationally. But the comedian told Maron his marijuana use was excessive and that he has smoked every day for eight years starting when he was 16. When he started having mental health issues — and what he described as outbursts of “blind rage” — he decided to go to rehab:

I’ve been a pothead forever, and I started around October, September last year, I started having these mental breakdowns, where I would like freak out. Rage. And then not remember what happened after… I was under the assumption that maybe it was the weed. I never really did any other drugs. [So I thought] I’m going to try to go to rehab for weed, maybe that would be helpful.

After being misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, he was finally given a borderline personality disorder diagnosis in December of last year. He said his therapist connected his fear of abandonment — a prominent symptom of borderline personality disorder — with the death of his father, a firefighter who died in the September 11 attacks when Davidson was only 7 years old.

“My big thing is trust, one day he was here, and the next day he’s gone,” he said. “I would have trouble sometimes when my mom would say, ‘I’m going out.’”

Although Davidson said this last year was the “worst year of his life,” he’s now in a dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) course, which he said is helping him learn to manage his emotions and reactions.

“I always thought something was wrong, when you find out something is actually wrong, it’s very reassuring,” he said.

You can listen to the whole interview here.

Lead photo via Saturday Night Life’s Youtube