Kendra Wilkinson: I Was Suicidal, Institutionalized

Reality star opens up about teenage drug problem

By DANIEL MACHT
|  Wednesday, Mar 17, 2010  |  Updated 3:15 AM EST
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Kendra Wilkinson: I Was Suicidal, Institutionalized

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Kendra Wilkinson in better days.

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Kendra Wilkinson struggled with drug addiction as a teenager and was briefly locked up for “feeling suicidal,” the reality TV star and new mom has revealed.

In an interview with E! for its True Hollywood Story series, the 24-year-old ex-“Girl Next Door” and Playboy model says her “drug days” began at 13 when a friend offered her cocaine.

By her sophomore year in high school, Wilkinson says she was using drugs “every day, every minute” and would cut herself too, Usmagazine.com reports.

After swallowing “a half dozen or so” pills at school at age 15, her mother checked her in a psychiatric facility, she said.

"It was crazy in that place," Wilkinson says in the interview, according to Us. "We didn't see daylight. We weren't allowed outside. It was basically a jail, but it was a hospital."

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Wilkinson, who now goes by her married name, Kendra Baskett, describes her hospitalization like a scene out of “Shutter Island.”

“I think it made me worse because in my heart I didn't want to change,” she says. “People were forcing me, and that's something that does not work with me.”

Wilkinson says after leaving the facility she eventually ran away from home to live with a deadbeat boyfriend.

Her interview for E! True Hollywood Story will air Wednesday at 10 p.m.
 

Posted Wednesday, Mar 17, 2010 - 3:04 AM EST
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