Mischa Barton Blames Breakdown on Dental Work

Wonderwall, Friday, September 11, 2009, 11:26am (PDT)

Us Weekly

On Friday's "The View," Mischa Barton got flustered when asked about her recent hospitalization.

Although she admitted she was "completely overwhelmed" by life, the "Beautiful Life" star, 23, called her hospitalization "silly."

"I mean, really it was blown out of proportion, so it's kind of silly now to be talking about it because I'm so fine now, but it was really just a bad time for me," she said. "It was sort of one of those things that was like a perfect storm. Everything happened at once."

When Barbara Walters pointed out that she was placed in a psychiatric ward, Barton shifted gears, blaming it all on dental work.

"Right, I mean, it was just ... I was overwhelmed," she said. "I had too much work going on. I had a surgery for my wisdom teeth that went really badly. I had been in the hospital. I had two surgeries on my wisdom teeth. I had four taken out, and they had gotten it really badly wrong. They had to drill into my jaw and I was just in really excruciating pain."

She continued, "I had an infection and a dry socket, and I woke up on a Sunday morning and there was no doctor available. I was trying to take the minimum amount of painkillers and get through it because I had to go to work soon and I was getting ready to go do this show, 'The Beautiful Life,' and meanwhile I still had a schedule to travel. I was going to Europe. I was going to London. I had things to do, and I was prepping to do photo shoots, and I was just overwhelmed. I had so much work to do and the surgery had gone so badly for me. And I think that I was just starting to feel completely overwhelmed. It was just too much to have this surgery go so wrong."

Why, then, was she put in a psychiatric hospital if her pain was physical, Joy Behar asked.

"When they take you into the hospital for something when it goes really wrong if you're having a meltdown and you say something like, 'I feel like I want to die,' ... they start injecting you with things to calm down," she explained. "Like, I'm petrified of needles. Like, absolutely petrified ... you can't come anywhere ... I had my blood drawn once in my life, for my insurance."

Barton said she is doing better these days.

"I just figure that if you hit rock bottom like that ... and you're around people, you know, you realize 'I'm nothing like these people,'" she said. "I have a career; I worked so hard for it. I'm such a positive person, and I really ... I think you can overcome anything, and for me having that kind of chronic pain for the first time in my life, like being in serious pain was such a wakeup call because, you know, I've seen friends go though terrible, terrible pain, and I've worked in hospitals and never experienced it myself. And I have such a newfound respect for people who live with that kind of pain, and I think it was just a wake-up call for me about life and respecting life so much more."

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