These days, actor Zachary Levy ("Shahazam", "Chuck", "Thor") is promoting his revealing autobiography, Radical Love: Learning To Accept Yourself and Others, in which he boldly reveals years of hard and ongoing struggle against depression, anxiety, Low self-esteem and suicidal thoughts, as someone who grew up at home with an abusive mother with a borderline personality and a rigid stepfather with high demands.
As part of the promotion of his book, Levy, 41, was interviewed on the Heart of the Matter podcast by journalist Elizabeth Vargas, in which he shared with listeners his mental breakdown at age 37 and the suicidal thoughts he experienced.
"I didn't realize I was dealing with these things until I turned 37," he said.
"Then I experienced a complete mental breakdown."
Levy revealed that enlightenment came to him when he moved to Austin, Texas, and tried one day to decide which restaurant to eat at.
"I remember sitting in my van, grabbing the steering wheel and just rocking back and forth as if I was trying to shake myself out of the whole situation, and I just cried and whimpered 'God save me,'" he said.
The actor added that at the same time also experienced suicidal thoughts, and not for the first time.
"I had no one there," he shared the loneliness he experienced.
"I had no support system and the darkness surrounded me. The lies whispered in my ear and the failure I felt was enough for me to say to myself 'Zack, you are not going to get out of this,'" he recalled.
Levy added that a friend offered to go to a life-changing treatment at a psychiatric hospital for a month to treat himself, a treatment that came close to his casting for the movie "Shahazam."
"When we promoted the film, I felt obligated to talk about this part of the story because I would not have accepted the role at all if I had not worked on myself," he added in an interview with USA TODAY.
"You have to recover and it's a journey of a lifetime," he said.
The actor wrote in his book that his mother would often slap him "I would be happier if you were dead."
He recounted: "My mother was a product of the environment in which she grew up. How could I think she was a horrible and evil person, knowing full well that the only reason for her behavior was because she had been abused by her own mother?".
The problematic parenting with which he grew up pushed him to seek an escape route in drugs and sex to alleviate the pain from which, he said, he tried to escape most of his life.
"The irony," he said, "is that alcohol can give you temporary relaxation, but the next day only intensifies the anxiety by dozens of counters. So you are in pursuit of getting more and it becomes a vicious circle."
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