Drew Carey Gets Candid About Taking Care of His Mental Health, Says Therapy, Close Friends Help (Exclusive)

For Drew Carey, achieving mental health has been a journey full of adversity and enlightenment.

In an interview with PEOPLE, The The price is right host, 65, talked about his decades-long progress, aided by resources including therapy and a circle of close, trusted friends.

“Therapy has been a big change for me,” he says in this week’s issue, adding, “I have a great therapist that I can count on to talk to me, actually several. And I have a group of very close friends that I am among. We always support each other. if someone doesn’t have time, we’re always there for them.”

Carey’s mental problems began when he was a teenager. Dealing with what he says is depression, the comedian tried to take his own life with sleeping pills at age 18 and again at age 23.

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Drew Carey serves Thanksgiving meals to crew assigned to the USS George HW Bush in November 2023.

U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communications Specialist 3rd Class Leah Moore

“If I was joking with my friends, I would be maniacally happy. Very high, very low,” Carey says, admitting to heavy drinking during his time at Kent State University. “I couldn’t choose a major. I couldn’t tell you with certainty what I wanted to do with my life, which many people can. There were people who simply knew what they wanted to do, and they needed a college degree as a stepping stone on the way to a life path they were sure of. There were a lot of people like that, and I wasn’t one of them.”

Although Carey never earned a college degree, he certainly found his purpose. After six years of work in the Marine Corps. Reserves as a field radio operator – “I was really proud to be a Marine” – scratched a longtime itch to try stand-up comedy.

His first big success happened in 1991 The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. “It was like a religious experience,” he explains. “I was in a state of flow. You can’t just stop and go, ‘Holy shit…! Johnny Carson!’ I have to continue performing.”

Several cable specials and a role in the 1994 NBC sitcom Good life paved the way for The Drew Carey Show, which he co-created with writer Bruce Helford. He played a fictionalized version of himself who worked in a department store office in Cleveland. Its 233 episodes were “the longest I’ve ever had a job doing anything,” he says — until 2007, when he began hosting The price is rightwhere he gave the longest-running TV game his own touch: a new set, logo and theme music.

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Drew Carey on ‘The Price Is Right’ in October 2019.

Greg Gayne/CBS via Getty

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At this point in his life, Carey is aware of his own worth. And when dark thoughts cloud his mind, he knows how to rely on his therapists and close friends.

“Now I have normal restless days, although I have to be careful because sometimes I have suicidal thoughts if things get pretty bad,” she admits. “Sometimes it gets pretty bad, but then I know I have the tools to get out of it. I remember once I was talking to my therapist about something that was making me very angry and stressed, and she said, ‘Well you you should to be angry and upset. A bad thing happened to you.’

It also helps that Carey has learned to be kinder to himself.

“I’ve learned to stop judging myself because I’m feeling bad that day or something happened,” he says. “I used to just think I wasn’t allowed to feel it, and if I did, it was the end of the world. ‘Stop feeling it, I can’t feel it, it’s wrong.’ I was going through all these things. Now I just say, ‘Oh, okay. This will work.'”

For more on Drew Carey, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE on newsstands Friday or subscribe here.

If you or someone you know needs mental health help, text “STRENGTH” to the text crisis line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.

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Source: HIS Education