Drew Carey Opens Up About Mental Health Struggles, Including Two Suicide Attempts

The Price is Right host and Whose Line Is It Anyway? legend Drew Carey says that his two suicide attempts during his younger years “were calls for help.” Four decades later, he still sometimes finds himself needing support.

Carey, 65, has long been open about his struggles with mental health — as a young man, he twice tried to take his own life by swallowing pills, once when he was 18 years old and a second time at some point in his early 20s. In that stage of his life, Carey was a college student struggling to stay enrolled at Kent State University amid poor academic performance, but Carey found direction and a sense of purpose in the United States Marine Corps Reserve, serving as a field radio operator in Ohio for six years.

Fast forward to today — Carey is a beloved comedian, a wildly successful game show host and a standout union member whose decision to spend over $700,000 keeping protestors fed during the recent WGA and SAG strikes earned praise from across the entertainment industry. But for all the success and growth Carey’s experienced in the decades since his early life struggles, he still deals with some of the depressive thoughts that haunted him as a young man. During his recent appearance on Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?, Carey discussed his mental health as an ongoing process.

"I think the suicide attempts were calls for help,” Carey told Wallace, explaining how he made his first attempt while attending a fraternity party at Kent State. “I was so mad that everybody was having a good time. I remember that. I remember walking down the stairs and everybody’s drinking and I was like, ‘What the hell are they so happy about?’”

Carey continued, “I was just angry that they were so happy. I was just tired of my life and (thought), who's gonna miss me?” While Carey has made significant strides in his struggle with depression over his illustrious career, he admits that thoughts similar to the ones that first drove him to self harm still come to him during dark moments. “I have a lot of that still,” Carey explained, “Like, the who's-gonna-miss-me type of thing. A lot of times I think to myself, if I die, I'm just gonna have my body cremated. No funeral and anything associated with, like, all my mementos and stuff. You can just burn them and give them away. Like, who cares?"

“I still get depressed, often, just like everyone else,” Carey revealed, “but it’s not as bad. I mean, just because you’re a celebrity and you have money doesn’t mean bad things don’t happen to you or you don’t have bad days. Everybody’s a person.”

“I’m a regular guy from Cleveland,” Carey concluded with a wry smile, “My girlfriend ties me to the bed one leg at a time, just like everyone else.”