Carrie Fisher Explains Just What Went Down During That Cruise Ship Episode
Back in February, author and actress Carrie Fisher was hospitalized as a result of her bi-polar disorder after a performance aboard a cruise ship seemed to reveal Fisher was a bit unhinged.
Just two days before she got on the ship, Fisher told PEOPLE that she'd had a dream in which "an armed militia lay in wait on the boat," but she went anyway. "It was whatever pathetic thing I picked up from my mother [Debbie Reynolds]," Fisher said. "You know, the show must go on."
But by the time she went on stage, Fisher admits that she was in the middle of a bi-polar episode. “I went completely off the rails,” she explained, saying that things were 10 times worse inside her own head.
I don't really remember what I did. I haven't watched the videos that people took. I know it got bad. I was in a very severe manic state, which bordered on psychosis. Certainly delusional. I wasn't clear what was going on. I was just trying to survive.
There are different versions of a manic state, and normally they're not as extreme as this became. I've only had this happen one other time, 15 years ago, so I didn't have a plan of action. That time I was in a [psychiatric] hospital, and I was being talked to by the television, hallucinating. I wasn't inside the TV this time, thank God. [But] I was in big trouble.
[On the cruise] I wasn't sleeping. I was writing on everything. I was writing in books; I would have written on walls. I literally would bend over and be writing on the ground and [my assistant] would try to talk to me, and I would be unable to respond. That was what I spent my teenage years doing: handwrite, handwrite, handwrite to the point where I'm running out of ink.
I can't wait to see what I wrote. I don't know what the hell it says. I do know this – and it was really bizarre – I was trapped in a metaphor. Everything I looked at had a meaning. Everything was a warning or a sign. I was in a part of my brain I've only been in one time before.
We weren't there, but we saw the video. And honestly? We've seen worse. (Ask Charlie Sheen about that.)
Regardless, Fisher spent some time in the hospital, had her meds reevaluated, and is now back home in Los Angeles -- where, we imagine, she's prepping for that role in the new 'Star Wars' movie.