Barton Assures Fans She’s ‘really Healthy’

MISCHA BARTON has played down continued fears for her health following her hospitalisation in July (09), insisting she is fine after “hitting rock bottom”.

The former The O.C. star was admitted to Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and put on psychiatric hold after calling police to her Hollywood home.

Barton has since blamed her heavy work schedule and a botched surgery to remove two wisdom teeth for her meltdown

She says, “I was overwhelmed. I had too much work on, I just had surgery on my wisdom teeth that went really badly.

“When I was in hospital I had four wisdom teeth and two were taken out and they’d gotten it really badly wrong, they had to drill into my jaw, I was in excruciating pain… (and) I think I was just starting to get overwhelmed and it was just too much to have this surgery go so wrong.”

Barton explains she was taken to the hospital’s psychiatric ward because she had a panic attack when medics tried to inject her with medication to numb the pain in her mouth: “When they take you into the hospital for something when it goes really wrong, if you’re having a meltdown and you say something like ‘I feel like I want to die’… they start injecting you with things to calm down.

“I’m petrified of needles, like, absolutely petrified… you can’t come anywhere (near me with a needle).”

The reported breakdown prompted Barton to re-evaluate her priorities and she relocated to New York to distance herself from bad Hollywood influences and the temptations of the movie industry.

She adds, “I just figure that, if you hit rock bottom like that … and you’re around people, you realise I’m nothing like these people.”

Barton is adamant fans no longer need to worry: “I got really healthy since then. I’ve just been doing everything I can to keep my job happy and healthy, and I’ve moved to New York with my two dogs and I have a great apartment.”

And the actress is keen to put the whole terrible series of events behind her - because it has already made bigger headlines than she could ever have imagined.

She says, “It was really blown out of proportion, so it’s kind of silly now to be talking about it because I’m so fine now, but it was really just a bad time for me. It was sort of one of those things that was like a perfect storm. Everything happened at once.”