SNL’s Pete Davidson Talks Mental Health Diagnosis & Quitting Weed

The 23-year-old comedian opened up in a new interview about the things he discovered about himself during the “worst year” of his life.

In a new interview with Marc Maron on his WTF With Marc Maron podcast, Pete Davidson, Saturday Night Live’s “resident young person,” reflects on the “worst year” of his life and some new revelations about himself.

People magazine reports that Davidson, who lost his father to the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers when he was seven, said he recently was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, which his doctors have pinpointed as the cause of his feeling “depressed all the time.”

Along with his new diagnosis, Davidson is going to therapy and taking new meds. “It is working, slowly but surely,” he told Maron. “I’ve been having a lot of problems. This whole year has been a fucking nightmare. This has been the worst year of my life, getting diagnosed with this and trying to figure out how to learn with this and live with this.”

Davidson took some time off from SNL to address his mental health issues. At first he suspected that drugs may have had to do with it, citing his heavy cannabis use as the original reason he went to rehab last December after he began suffering “mental breakdowns.”

“I never really did any other drugs, so I was like, I’m gonna try to go to rehab. Maybe that’ll be helpful,” said the self-described “forever” pothead, according to People. “So I go and I get off weed. They told me there, they’re like, ‘You might be bipolar,’ and I was like, ‘OK.’ So they’re like, ‘We’re gonna try you on these meds.’ And then I got out [of rehab], and then I started smoking weed again—and I’m on meds.”

But after going through another “really bad” mental breakdown in February, he stopped smoking again and shared on Instagram that he was “happy and sober for the first time in eight years.” Davidson addressed his hiatus from SNL in his return to the show, joking that now that he’s sober, “everyone thinks I’m unfunny and boring.”

Still, Davidson didn’t feel right, so he went back to his doctors. “I found out I have BPD, which is borderline personality disorder,” he said. “One of my psychiatrists [diagnosed me]. He was saying before this big meltdown, ‘You’re probably bipolar or borderline, we’re just going to have to figure it out.’”

In a September interview with High Times, Davidson revealed that the main reason he uses marijuana is to counteract the symptoms of Crohn’s disease, which he was diagnosed with around age 17. “I found that the medicines that the doctors were prescribing me, and seeing all these doctors and trying new things, weed would be the only thing that would help me eat,” he said.