(Web Desk) - The reality star opens up to PEOPLE in an emotional interview about how she's healing from unresolved trauma four months after being hospitalized
Kendra Wilkinson’s life flashed before her eyes. She thought she was going to die.
Her chest was tight. She was short of breath and overcome with fear. “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. I had hit rock bottom,” she tells PEOPLE in her first interview since being hospitalized after suffering a panic attack in September.
Wilkinson's voice trails off and her hands fall slowly into her lap. “I was dying of depression,” she says, sitting in the living room of a friend's Newport Beach home, her eyes filling with tears.
“I was hitting the end of my life, and I went into psychosis. I felt like I wasn’t strong enough to live anymore.”
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 Girls Next Door, but Wilkinson is only beginning to work through the damage done by her time living in his controversial Playboy world.
"It’s not easy to look back at my 20s. I’ve had to face my demons,” says Wilkinson, 38, who returned to the hospital a week after her Sept. 6 trip to the emergency room (her ex-husband, former NFL player Hank Baskett, was by her side).
During her second visit, she was placed on the antipsychotic medication Abilify. Says the star: “Playboy really messed my whole life up."
In the weeks following her hospitalizations Wilkinson also began outpatient therapy three times a week at UCLA, where professionals helped her tackle unresolved trauma largely stemming from her time living in Hefner's mansion and her painful 2019 divorce from Baskett, 41.
“It was the lowest place I’ve ever been in my life. I felt like I had no future. I couldn’t see in front of my depression,” says Wilkinson, who explains that she had been struggling to find a fresh start in real estate. “I was giving up and I couldn’t find the light. I had no hope.”
For weeks leading up to her hospitalization, Wilkinson — who has spoken in the past about being placed in a psychiatric facility as a teen after swallowing half a dozen pills — hadn’t been eating or sleeping, and her head was spinning.
She kept asking herself: “How am I going to succeed?” “What am I doing wrong in my life?” “Do I give up?”