Cara Delevingne Reveals She Checked Into Rehab After 'Heartbreaking' Photos Surfaced Of Her Bizarre Behavior: 'Sometimes You Need A Reality Check'
March 8 2023, Published 9:45 a.m. ET
Cara Delevingne is coming clean about those photos that made the rounds last year in which she looked disheveled and confused.
After seeing the pictures — in which the model was seen smoking a pipe while wearing no shoes a Britney Spears T-shirt — she realized she needed to change her behavior.
Delevingne, 30, had just returned from Burning Man, and “I hadn’t slept. I was not OK,” she said in a new interview. “It’s heartbreaking because I thought I was having fun, but at some point it was like, OK, I don’t look well. You know, sometimes you need a reality check, so in a way those pictures were something to be grateful for.”
The blonde beauty has struggled with drinking for a long time, and she recalled her first experience with alcohol at seven years old when she was at a family wedding. “I woke up in my granny’s house in my bedroom with a hangover, in a bridesmaid’s dress,” she recalled. “I’d gone around nailing glasses of champagne.”
She was later prescribed sleeping pills at 10 years old to help with her insomnia. “This was the beginning of mental health issues and inadvertent self-harm,” she said of later being diagnosed with dyspraxia, a disorder that affects movement and coordination.
“I was on medication and it just…it saved my life,” she said of having a mental breakdown five years later. “This wasn’t a chemical imbalance as much as it was a full trauma response. I hadn’t uncovered the f****** hole inside, the real whirlpool within. And I still think there’s a part of diagnosis and labeling that is damaging. There were so many times that I was encouraged to take this or be put on that.”
During COVID-19, the actress was living with then-girlfriend Ashley Benson, but when they split, she felt "really alone ... it was a low point."
“I just had a complete existential crisis. All my sense of belonging, all my validation — my identity, everything — was so wrapped up in work. And when that was gone, I felt like I had no purpose. I just wasn’t worth anything without work, and that was scary,” she admitted. “Instead of taking the time to really learn something new or do something new, I got very wrapped up in misery, wallowing, and partying. It was a really sad time.”
Things spiraled out of control when she flew to Burning Man.
“There’s an element of feeling invincible when I’m on drugs,” she said. “I put myself in danger in those moments because I don’t care about my life. I would climb anything and jump off stuff … it felt feral. It’s a scary thing to the people around you who love you.”
Fortunately, the star's pals were by her side and tried to get her the help she needed. “I have so many friends,” she noted. “They ride for me and I love my friends so much, but it felt like a lot of the time, they were shallow relationships only because I wasn’t able to be honest about the things I was going through. I didn’t want to burden anyone. It was also like, What if people leave? If you ask any of my friends, they would say they’d never seen me cry. From September, I just needed support. I needed to start reaching out. And my old friends I’ve known since I was 13, they all came over and we started crying. They looked at me and said, ‘You deserve a chance to have joy.’ ”
- Loving Intervention! Cara Delevingne's Concerned Friends Beg Her To 'Go To Rehab' Following Recent Spiraling Behavior
- Friends Fear 'California Sober' Demi Lovato 'Is Playing With Fire,' Could Be 'Heading Toward Another Downward Spiral': Source
- It's All About 'Balance': Demi Lovato Reveals She Hasn't Cut Out Substances Entirely Ahead Of Tell-All 'Dancing With The Devil' Documentary
Want OK! each day? Sign up here!
“I’ve had interventions of a sort, but I wasn’t ready. That’s the problem. If you’re not face-first on the floor and ready to get up again, you won’t. At that point,” she continued, adding that she checked herself into rehab late last year.
“I hadn’t seen a therapist in three years,” she said. “I just kind of pushed everyone away, which made me realize how much I was in a bad place. I always thought that the work needs to be done when the times are bad, but actually the work needs to be done when they’re good. The work needs to be done consistently. It’s never going to be fixed or fully healed but I’m OK with that, and that’s the difference.”
Never miss a story — sign up for the OK! newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what OK! has to offer. It’s gossip too good to wait for!
Additionally, she is now committed to a 12-step program. “Before I was always into the quick fix of healing, going to a weeklong retreat or to a course for trauma, say, and that helped for a minute, but it didn’t ever really get to the nitty-gritty, the deeper stuff. This time I realized that 12-step treatment was the best thing, and it was about not being ashamed of that. The community made a huge difference. The opposite of addiction is connection, and I really found that in 12-step," she shared.
Vogue spoke with the Hollywood starlet.