Comedienne turned political activist Chelsea Handler revealed Friday that she had to see a psychiatrist in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Appearing on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” to discuss her new book “Life Will Be the Death of Me,” Handler compared the destabilization she felt from Donald Trump’s election win to that of losing her brother when she was just nine years old.
“Everybody took the 2016 election hard,” asserted Maher, “but I didn’t really know it really knocked you down like that.”
“I had a mid-life identity crisis once Trump won the election because I had never had my world feel so unhinged, I think,” she confessed to Maher. “I had to pay a psychiatrist to listen to me b**** about Donald Trump for about the first three weeks.”
“And then once 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,” Handler said.
“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,” she continued.
“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 f***ing fight people, you know? And I was like, ‘I have to go see a psychiatrist,'” added Handler.
Maher then touched on the “white guilt” aspect of the activist’s book: “There is a lot in there about what I would call ‘white guilt.’ I mean, what good does that do?”
Handler responded, “I think you can also focus on becoming a better advocate/ally for marginalized communities and stop looking inside your own lane and look outside to others.”
“There’s a lot of white people hating on themselves. First of all, that doesn’t help minorities — they don’t say, ‘Oh boy, that makes me feel a lot better; she hates herself.’ I just feel like we’re kind of self-flagellating ourself and it’s not helping,” Maher countered.
Handler disagreed: “I think self-flagellation is good with regard to this. I think we have been misbehaving so long that we need to get our s*** together,” she said, adding, “It’s important to reach out and go, ‘What was your story like, what was your life like?’ It’s not like mine. I didn’t have that many struggles. I’ve never been hungry, I’ve never been assaulted.”
“I’m in an awakening,” posited Handler. “And then, I had my awakening and I’m like, ‘Wait! F*** Trump!’ We’ve got so many other beautiful things going on. There’s optimism, there’s beautiful things happening.”
Before election day, Handler vowed to leave the United States if Trump were to win. But in the wake of his victory, the activist suggested it would be unfair of her to leave, as she’s needed to stay and fight with the anti-Trump #Resistance.
“Yesterday, my staff reminded me that platforms and voices like mine are needed more than ever; leaving the country is quitting,” she posted in a November 2016 tweet.
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