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Bowen Yang is struggling with “bad bouts of depersonalisation”.
Bowen Yang is taking a break
The ‘Saturday Night Live’ star is taking a “very short break” from his and Matt Rogers’ ‘Las Culturistas’ podcasts because he is struggling with the disorder – which is described as feeling you are observing yourself from outside of your body or feel things around you aren’t real, and can be “very disturbing” – but reassured his fans he is “doing [his] best” to get better.
He wrote on his Instagram Story: “Taking a very short break from last clutch. Bad bouts of depersonalization are f****** me up bad but I am doing my best to get better! Please take care, be back soon.(sic)”
The 32-year-old star previously described himself as “pretty damaged” and recalled an incident when he was 17 and his parents found an online conversation he’d been having using an instant messaging service.
He told the New York Times newspaper in 2020: “Me sort of having lewd conversations with someone, just revealing that this was who I was, that I was gay.
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“They just sat me down and yelled at me and said, ‘We don’t understand this. Where we come from, this doesn’t happen.’ I’d only seen my father cry when my grandpa died and now he’s sobbing in front of me every day at dinner. And I’m thinking, ‘How do I make this right?’ This is the worst thing you can do as a child of immigrants. It’s just like you don’t want your parents to suffer this much over you.”
Bowen’s father later arranged for eight sessions of treatment for the comedy writer, which turned out to be conversion therapy.
He said: “I allowed myself the thought experiment of, ‘What if this could work?’
“Even though as I read up on it, I was just like, ‘Oh, wait, this is all completely crackers.’ At the first session, he asks me, ‘Would you like this to be Christ centered or a secular sort of experience?’
“And I was like, ‘I guess nonreligious.’ But even for him to ask that question means that there was this kind of religious agenda behind it anyway.
“The first few sessions were talk therapy, which I liked, and then it veers off into this place of, ‘Let’s go through a sensory description of how you were feeling when you’ve been attracted to men.’
“And then the counsellor would go through the circular reasoning thing of, ‘Well, weren’t you feeling uncomfortable a little bit when you saw that boy you liked?’ And I was like, ‘Not really.’ He goes, ‘How did your chest feel?’ And I was like, ‘Maybe I was slouching a little bit’ And he goes, ‘See? That all stems from shame.’ It was just crazy. Explain the gay away with pseudoscience.”
