The Glee star was so depressed she downed bottles of NyQuil syrup
We know her as self-confident, hard-hitting Sue Sylvester in hit show Glee, but Jane Lynch has revealed that she was so depressed she would down bottles of cold medicine to get a ‘happy oblivion’.
In her upcoming memoir ‘Happy Accidents’, Lynch writes that she turned to cold medicine after giving up drinking when she was 31-years-old, amid fears she was becoming an alcoholic.
She managed to give up her addiction to alcohol, but found a new escape by downing over-the-counter bottles of NyQuil cold medicine.
‘I found myself eating about a gallon of chocolate ice cream daily to replace the copious amounts of sugar my body was used to from my daily beer intake, ‘ Lynch writes.
‘I did, however, continue my habit of taking NyQuil before bed. Though no longer drinking Miller Lite I was in need of something to soothe me.
‘The fact that NyQuil had alcohol in it was not something I acknowledged at all. I still considered myself on the wagon.’
It was during a 10-month stay in New York, where Lynch was in a play about the TV family The Brady Bunch, that her depression got even worse.
‘I was miserable the whole time,’ the 51-year-old writes in her book, ‘I’d close the drapes, take a swig of NyQuil, toast with a simple ‘bye bye’ and go into a deep sleep.’
Lynch said she eventually sought help from Alcoholics Anonymous after a night getting high with her cast mates: ‘I smoked myself into oblivion that night. I still felt like crap and even lonelier that I had felt before.’
Lynch credits her life’s turn around to wife Lara Embrey, who she was ‘smitten’ with at first sight.