Christina Applegate Says She Doesn’t ‘Enjoy Living’ Amid Multiple Sclerosis Diagnosis
Christina Applegate opened up about her mental health struggles amid her multiple sclerosis diagnosis.
“I don’t enjoy living,” Applegate, 52, said on the Tuesday, June 4, episode of the “MeSsy” podcast, which was recorded in early 2024. “I don’t enjoy it. I don’t enjoy things anymore.”
Applegate told Jamie-Lynn Sigler that it’s “enjoyable” when she has pals come over and talk to her while lying in bed.
“I enjoy that,” she admitted. “But if someone’s like, ‘Let’s get up and go for a walk.’ Or, ‘Let’s go get a coffee,’ I’m like, ‘I don’t enjoy that process.’”
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Applegate shared that she’s “in a depression” at the moment, which she said she hadn’t felt in years.
“A real f–k it all depression. Like, a real depression, where it’s kind of scaring me too a little bit because it feels really fatalistic, it feels really ‘end of,’” she said. “Not saying that. I don’t mean that, but I’m trapped in this darkness right now that I haven’t felt in I don’t even know how long, probably 20-something years.”
Applegate noted that she made a phone call to her therapist — which she said was a “big thing” for her — and had a scheduled appointment the following week.
“I have avoided therapy since I’ve been diagnosed because I’m so afraid to start crying and that I’m not going to be able to end crying,” she said. “And so, my way of doing things is to make fun of myself.”
While she made a brief appearance at the Emmys in January, Applegate pointed out that her first words on-stage were self-deprecating. She added, “Because I could feel myself going into that space of where I wasn’t going to be able to stop or read what I was supposed to read without, I don’t know, making people laugh or making them feel more comfortable about it.”
Referencing her disability joke at the event, Applegate said, “I was so disabled that I slurred the word disabled. … I literally blacked out as I was walking out — that thing where you just get white in the face.”
Applegate has been candid about her attitude toward the disease. In March, the actress said she’s “not putting a timestamp” on her “grieving process” since being diagnosed in 2021.
“I’m never going to wake up and go, ‘This is awesome.’ I’m just going to tell you that,” Applegate said during an interview with Good Morning America. “Like it’s just not going to happen. I wake up and I’m reminded of it every day. … But I might get to a place where I will function a little bit better. Right now, I’m isolating. And that’s kind of how I’m dealing with it is by not going anywhere because I don’t want to do it. It’s hard.”
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Amid her battle, Applegate has got a crew in her corner — including Johnathon Schaech, whom she was married to from 2001 to 2007, and her daughter, Sadie Grace. (Applegate shares her daughter with her husband, Martyn LeNoble.)
“She’s the toughest and one of the strongest woman I’ve ever met,” Schaech, 54, exclusively told Us Weekly on Saturday, June 1. “She’s gone through so much in her life. She’s prevailed every single time and she will prevail over this as well.”
