Comedian Chelsea Handler blamed the 2016 election of Donald Trump for a “midlife identity crisis” that resulted in her seeing a psychiatrist.
Appearing on Friday night’s “Real Time With Bill Maher,” the liberal comedian also discussed how taking up “cannabis” helped her cope.
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“I had to pay a psychiatrist to listen to me bitch about Donald Trump for about the first three weeks,” Handler told host Bill Maher.
And then once when we got past that and we got to the real stuff, I realized the parallel there was my world becoming unhinged when I was a little girl, my brother died when I was nine years old. I had never related the two, but for me, as I can imagine it must have been for so many people, it was a huge emotional trigger of everything being destabilized and I realized just how spoiled and privileged I had been all my life to realize, to be this upset and this on-a-ten every day and the outrage and the anger, I just wanted to fucking fight people, you know? And I was like, ‘I gotta to go see a psychiatrist.’
Maher then opened up the topic of Trump having “led” Handler to “smoking pot.”
“The best part of it is you found weed,” he said. (RELATED: Chelsea Handler Says She’s ‘Very Sexually Attracted’ To Robert Mueller)
“I pivoted [from alcohol] toward weed and cannabis and for me as an active and high strung person, the cannabis was a gateway drug to meditation,” Handler said.
During a later discussion about the concept of “self-flagellating” oneself for being white, Handler took issue with Maher’s contention that it was counter-productive.
“I think self-flagellation is good with regard to this,” she said. “I think we’ve misbehaved for so long that we need to get our shit together.”