Mayim Bialik And Kunal Nayyar Shaded Tom Cruise’s Controversial Take On Psychiatric Drugs

In 2021, The Big Bang Theory alums Kunal Nayyar and Mayim Bialik had a serious discussion about mental health on the latter’s Breakdown podcast. The host, who’s a real-life neuroscientist, asked her former co-star about overcoming his anxiety and panic attacks.

During their conversation, Nayyar and Bialik addressed the effect of psychiatric drugs on some people — kind of supporting Tom Cruise‘s controversial comments about them. In 2005, the health-risk stunt junkie told Matt Lauer that Brooke Shields’ postpartum depression medications were “ridiculous and dangerous.”

Mayim Bialik And Kunal Nayyar Half-Agree With Tom Cruise’s Take On Anti-Depressants

During his battle with anxiety, Nayyar told his therapist that he didn’t want to be there “because I don’t want to take medication.” He told Bialik that he was “very scared to take medication for some reason” but joked that he was “self-medicating with five Martinis a night.” The actor, who’s married to beauty queen and actress Neha Kapur, revealed that he never took anti-anxiety drugs.

“So he gave me these pills. He said, ‘Keep them for an emergency. So you know in your pocket you have it. So if you’re in an elevator and you can’t get out of it, take one. Don’t worry,’” Nayyar recalled. “Sure enough I’m on the 17th floor to go see my dentist and I begin to have this horrible panic and I have this pill in my hand, I take it out, and I hear this voice. It just said, ‘Before you run away from yourself, I just want to die.’”

Then he said to himself, “Even if I die right now, I’m not going to run away from myself.” After that, he “threw the pill away.” Bialik responded by sharing her experience with medication during “the times in my life when I’ve been the most debilitated by challenges, depression, anxiety, panic.”

Nayyar quickly cut in, saying: “There are moments and people and situations where medication can do wonders. I’m not against anxiety medication. Everyone’s journey is their journey… It just so happened in my situation, there was just something that stopped me.”

The podcaster added “that when people make a decision to not take medication, they often do very little to try and get to the root or they often do not have the resources to get to the root of what’s going on. Medication… It is not for everyone, but if you choose not to take medication, there’s a lot of work that you do have to do. It will not magically disappear.”

Unlike the Big Bang stars, Cruise didn’t have a case-to-case stance on psychiatric drugs. He was firm on them being “unhealthy” due to “black label warnings” despite delivering a “heartfelt” apology to Shields right at her home. His statement was deemed “dangerous” to people considering treatment.

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How Kunal Nayyar Overcame His Anxiety Without Medication

After throwing his anti-anxiety pill, Nayyar embarked on a “spiritual journey.” Back then, he promised to himself: “I don’t want to run away from myself anymore. I want to get to know who I am.” He started getting into Deepak Chopra, working on being more present, and understanding himself better to overcome his fears.

Another wake-up call was his desire to spend quality time with his family. “I can’t drive on the highway [he had panic attacks while driving], how will I take them on a road trip?” he told Bialik. “How can be a husband to protect my wife if I’m having panic and anxiety? So I hate a lot of that. And I was functional on the outside. But it manifested in other ways: drinking, anger, frustration.”

He later got to the source of it saying: “All of that was truly only because I had drifted very far away from my true nature. The only reason I know I feel anxious or panicky or anything is because I’m disconnected [from] reality. That I’m living either an imagined truth or something that I’m harping on in the memory of my past.”

Following his inner work, Nayyar got to enjoy acting more after TBBT. Here are some of his major projects:

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Mayim Bialik Advocates For Finding The Right Mental Health Medications

In 2018, Bialik said in in The Child Mind Institute’s #MyYoungerSelf social media campaign that when it comes to psychiatric medication, it’s always about finding the “right kind.” She even opened up about her own journey. “I think what I would have liked to tell my younger self about my mental health is that there are answers.”

She continued: “And for me, some of those answers I had to wait years to find and I needed to get different help, which ended up being really the right kind of help.” She admitted that she “had this notion, when I was younger, that if something didn’t work once, or if a therapist didn’t work, or if a medication didn’t work, that nothing would ever work.”

She then told fans: “I wish I could have told my younger self, something will work. It’s just going to take sometimes more research, sometimes more referrals, and really figuring things out like your life depends on it, because for me, it did.”

Source: NewsFinale