Kevin Smith Gets Candid About His Recent Mental Health Crisis

Kevin Smith reveals his struggle with mental health: The Clerks director says that he underwent intensive treatment to heal!

Kevin Smith bares it all as he reveals his recent bout with mental struggle. The beloved Clerk director had to spend a month in a treatment facility, Arizona's Sierra Tucson treatment center, last January after he experienced what Smith calls a "weird, dark place." The 52-year-old director also unveils his past traumatic experiences and what he believes led to his current mental state. 

"At that moment, I wouldn't have been averse to not being around any longer. I called a friend and said, 'I'm in a weird, dark place. I need to go somewhere and get help," Smith said in his recent conversation with People. Further touching on the topic, the Chasing Amy director says, "For the last month, I have been at a mental health facility." He adds, "I had a complete break from reality and became very dissociated."   

Smith details how his unpleasant and horrific childhood experiences have come to affect his life. The Dogma director suffered from body dysmorphia and on most days, overworked himself to burnout. Kevin revealed that his therapist linked his struggle to his early life- when he was six and was sexually abused by an older boy. While the director recalled the formative incident as just a playful interaction between three kids, as he told his therapist "(we) were just playing doctor in an alleyway," when it happened.  

After Kevin revealed that a stranger older boy asked him to perform sexual acts with a little neighborhood girl- an incident Smith previously construed to be harmless, Smith's therapist framed the incident in a different light as she cleared it to the director that what that older boy did was abusive. "When a third party is instructing you to do something against your core values like that, that's sexual abuse," Kevin's therapist told him.   

The director/actor's relationship with himself was further shaped by the constant body-shaming he suffered as a kid. "I felt disgusting like I didn't matter," Kevin explains, adding "That's when 'the other guy' started to appear. I decided to be entertaining and make people love me before they noticed I was fat." He explains how he put up a brave, people-pleasing persona to grapple with the deeply-embedded shame and trauma. "The other guy' became my favorite piece of clothing to wear. I'd just let him take over," says the filmmaker.   

Kevin explains how accepting his past and facing it consciously healed his inner child. "I learned that there’s no differentiation [between levels of trauma] to the human nervous system. Internally, trauma is trauma," says the director, who has been married to former reporter Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, since 1999. The couple shares a 23-year-old daughter, Harley Quinn Smith.  

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