Paris Jackson Says Her PTSD Worsened at Utah Treatment Facility

The 28-year-old has never shied away from discussing her mental health struggles publicly. Now, she's shedding light on an experience she says left lasting scars, both figurative and literal.

Paris Jackson is opening up about a painful chapter of her adolescence. After attempting suicide at 15, she was placed in a treatment facility in Utah, where she says she endured emotional and psychological abuse.

The singer and actress sat down with Jay Shetty on his podcast "On Purpose" on Monday, August 17, where she was asked to describe the facilities she'd been sent to. "Each one was different. I know some people that have been to the ones that were not as bad or worse," Jackson, 28, began.

"I definitely left with more PTSD than I went in there with and had nightmares for two or three years about going back after I finally left because I was there for a couple of months," she continued.

Looking back on the ordeal, Jackson noted that she considers herself "one of the lucky ones" who avoided "physical or sexual abuse" — though she says other forms of mistreatment were rampant.

"There was definitely a lot of psychological, emotional, spiritual abuse that happened there. Like pitting the clients against each other," she said, explaining that she couldn't bring herself to trust her roommate or her therapist.

"I can't trust anybody here because anything you say could put you on the lowest level and you can't really call your family and tell them because they're listening," she explained. "They will call your family and be like, 'Don't listen to her. She's lying to you.'"

"And then you get a consequence... and you're on meds and you're zombie-d out and it's rough. You have to learn how to kind of play the game if you want to get out," she concluded.

Jackson has long been candid about her battles with self-image and low self-esteem. She's previously described what pushed her toward that suicide attempt at 15, admitting she was overwhelmed by depression and drug addiction at the time.

"It was just self-hatred, low self-esteem, thinking that I couldn't do anything right, not thinking I was worthy of living anymore," she told Rolling Stone in 2017. Jackson had been homeschooled before her father Michael Jackson's death.

She later agreed to attend a private school starting in seventh grade but found it difficult to fit in. That disconnect led her to fall in with an older crowd, "a lot of older people doing a lot of crazy things," she recalled.

"I was doing a lot of things that 13-, 14-, 15-year-olds shouldn't do. I tried to grow up too fast, and I wasn't really that nice of a person," she added. She also endured cyberbullying, and says harsh online comments still affect her today.

One trauma had gone unspoken publicly until that interview. At 14, Jackson said, a much older "complete stranger" sexually assaulted her. "I don't wanna give too many details. But it was not a good experience at all, and it was really hard for me, and, at the time, I didn't tell anybody."

Before her suicide attempt — which she admitted wasn't her first — she'd been self-harming in secret, hiding it from her family. Several of her tattoos now conceal those scars, along with what she describes as track marks from past drug use.

"It was just once that it became public," she said. The hospital enforced a "three-strike rule," she recalled, and after her final attempt, staff insisted she enter a residential therapy program.

She ended up spending her sophomore year and half of junior year at a therapeutic school in Utah. "It was great for me," she reflected. "I'm a completely different person."

Looking back on who she was before, she admitted, "I was crazy. I was actually crazy. I was going through a lot of, like, teen angst. And I was also dealing with my depression and my anxiety without any help."

Earlier this year, Jackson, who met her mother around the same time she attempted to take her own life, revealed she has been sober from drugs and alcohol for six years.