The Role of Klonopin in Hayden Panettiere's Death

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Hayden Panettiere died on August 16, five days before her 37th birthday. She was 36. This video is about what she told us about her own life while she was alive, because she was remarkably open about it, and because her story contains warnings that may save someone else.

In her memoir and interviews, Hayden described being pressured to take Adderall for press events as a teenager. She described roughly a decade of addiction, the public scrutiny of her body that fed dysmorphia, and using substances to manage her mood. During Nashville she went through postpartum depression, isolation, and alcoholism while watching those same struggles get written into her character, which she described as traumatic. And she was prescribed Klonopin, a benzodiazepine, to help her cope with postpartum depression and alcohol withdrawal, alongside a reported history of opiates for chronic back pain.

As a psychiatrist, that combination is what I want you to understand. Long-term benzodiazepine use is associated with worsening depression and anxiety over time, the very symptoms it gets prescribed for. And the combination of benzodiazepines and opiates carries the strongest boxed warning a drug can hold, because together they can suppress breathing during sleep. Prescribing that combination to someone with a known history of addiction and alcohol dependence is a decision that deserves scrutiny every single time it happens, for any patient, anywhere.

In this video I walk through her story in her own words, what these medications do with long-term use, and the questions every patient and family should ask when these drugs are prescribed together.

My condolences go to her daughter, her family, and everyone who loved her.

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DISCLAIMER: All the information on this channel is for educational and/or entertainment purposes and not intended to be specific/personal medical advice from me to you. Watching the videos, or getting answers to comments/question, does not establish a doctor-patient relationship. If you have your own doctor, these videos can maybe help you prepare for your discussion with him. We do our best to spread awareness with these videos, but for legal reasons we can’t answer health questions in the comments. If you leave questions, we’ll make videos about common questions in the future! If we catch incorrect health information, hate speech, illegal solicitation of drugs in the comments, we will remove them.