'I Was Dying of Depression'

THE REALITY STAR OPENS UP ABOUT HER HUGH HEFNER PAST, MANAGING DEBILITATING DEPRESSION AND THE NEW LIFE SHE'S BUILDING FOR HER TWO KIDS 

- DANIELLE BACHER

While in the midst of a panic attack in early September, Kendra Wilkinson felt like she was going to die. “I was in a state of panic. I didn’t know what was going on in my head and my body or why I was crying,” she recalls of the terrifying episode, during which she was rushed to a Los Angeles-area hospital with the help of her ex-husband, former NFL player Hank Baskett. “I had hit rock bottom, and I was dying of depression.”

Four months after her hospitalization, the reality star distinctly remembers her feelings of despair. “I felt like I wasn’t strong enough to live anymore,” says Wilkinson, 38, growing emotional in a family friend’s Newport Beach, Calif., home during her first interview since the mental health crisis. While it’s been 20 years since she first rose to fame at age 18 as one of Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends on the reality series The Girls Next Door, Wilkinson is just beginning to work through the damage done by her time in his controversial world. “It’s not easy to look back at my 20s. I’ve had to face my demons,” says Wilkinson, who returned to the hospital a week after her Sept. 6 hospitalization to begin antipsychotic medication. “Playboy really messed my whole life up.” She also underwent outpatient therapy three times a week at UCLA, tackling unresolved trauma largely stemming from her time living in the Playboy mansion and from her painful divorce from Baskett, 41, in 2019. “I’m so proud of myself for battling this. My two kids need me, and I can’t give up,” says Wilkinson of finding strength in her son Hank IV, 14, and daughter Alijah Mary, 9. “I’m in the rebuilding process, and I have a lot to look forward to.”