Bowen Yang Reveals How Antidepressant Struggles Triggered His Podcast Break

Saturday Night Live comedian and actor Bowen Yang has returned to his hit podcast, Las Culturistas, three weeks after he announced he’d be taking a break due to experiencing episodes of depersonalization. On a new episode out this week, Yang reunited with his co-host, Matt Rogers, and offered a deeper explanation of what had been messing with his mental health.

“I was on Wellbutrin and I got, full transparency, a low dose of Adderall just to help with the travel,” said Yang, who was in the midst of filming the Wicked movie in London when he announced his hiatus from the podcast. “It’s not working. If it’s working for you, God bless, but Wellbutrin wasn’t for me.”

Wellbutrin, an antidepressant that is used to treat a variety of disorders, increases the levels of serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine in the brain. Rogers noted that he’d previously had some of his own reservations about taking the drug.

“I was warned against [taking Wellbutrin] just because I identify as a pretty anxious person,” Rogers said. “And I’ve heard that when you’re dealing with anxiety, [Wellbutrin] maybe isn’t the girl. And so when you were saying you were struggling, I was like, well, maybe it’s because of the Wellbutrin of it all.”

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“I know certain people, and we won’t name names, had an issue with the word depersonalization,” Yang added. “It is, like, the clinical term for what I was, what I am, experiencing.”

The Mayo Clinic defines depersonalization as the recurring feeling “that you’re observing yourself from outside your body or you have a sense that things around you aren’t real, or both.”

Yang, a three-time Emmy nominee who in addition to Wicked also voices a character in the upcoming Garfield movie, said he would continue to be mindful of his mental health in the future.

“This is a self-knowledge journey that we’re on, for me at least,” he said. “We’ll just leave it at that.”

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