Linda Hamilton has invested “hundreds of thousands of dollars” in her mental health journey, the action star revealed while discussing her current stability after battling bipolar disorder and depression for two decades.
The 68-year-old Terminator actress opened up about the financial and emotional costs of her recovery during a recent interview with PEOPLE magazine.
“I can apply the brakes because I spent years and years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get better,” Hamilton said, describing the substantial investment she made in professional treatment.
The actress, known for her tough action-hero roles, explained that her public persona often masks the reality of her mental health.
“Nobody ever thinks that I’m going to struggle. [They think] I’ll be fine — ‘It’s Linda Hamilton,'” she said during the interview about her new sci-fi film Osiris.
Hamilton’s mental health struggles spanned from age 20 to 40, a period she previously described as her lost years in a 2004 AP Radio interview when she first publicly disclosed her bipolar disorder and depression diagnoses.
During the interview, she detailed experiencing severe manic episodes.
“You don’t need sleep. I think I existed on four hours sleep a night for four years. Sleep doesn’t seem necessary. You wake up feeling great. But it’s not all great feelings. A lot of the raging that I did I think was the manic part of my disorder,” she told AP Radio.
Her first husband, actor Bruce Abbott, recognized the extreme mood swings before she had a diagnosis. “My first husband [actor Bruce Abbott] said you have the most incredible joy and the most incredible sorrow that goes with it. Without giving it a name, he had pretty much summed it up for me,” she recalled.
Hamilton described the manic periods as involving “the capacity for fighting, war, taking everything on, taking too much on, overachieving and then raging because my system was so depleted.”
Now, Hamilton uses her experience to encourage others facing similar battles, emphasizing that recovery is possible despite the challenges.