Paramore’s Hayley Williams Reveals Hospitalization, Rehab Stint Following Divorce

Paramore lead singer Hayley Williams admitted she did not handle her divorce well. Williams split from her 16-month marriage to New Found Glory band member, Chad Gilbert, in 2017. In an interview with Page Six, Williams shares that things got really dark in her head and admitted how panic attacks became a scary occurrence for her.

“I started to have a lot of those again. It resulted in me having panic attacks, and I ended up in a hospital. I’d faint,” Williams explained. “They’re pretty f—ed. There’s often water in my dreams. I’ve always written about relationships using water metaphors. My most memorable recurring dreams from childhood are all water related.” The 31-year-old said that all of this began to hit her because she was in denial about all that was going on. In recovering, Williams says “talk therapy’ has been a much better tool than medication.

“It’s been a slow lesson for me — how much power our emotions have on our physical health. It started to happen because I was in denial,” Williams said. “I found a facility where I could go and be in a safe group or by myself and talk,” noting it was there that she was diagnosed with PTSD and depression.”

In the interview, the “Still Into You” lead singer said she rushed into the marriage with Gilbert due to “a lot of shame about mistakes I’d made.” As a result, she called the whole ordeal premature, noting that Gilbert wasn’t even divorced from his first wife before they began building a relationship. Earlier in May, Williams released her own album, “Petals For Armor,” which was her first new music since the divorce. In an interview with Pitchfork, Williams opens up about the album, sharing that at the heart of it all was the emotions that boiled up as a result of her divorce.

“When I knew I was going to be getting a divorce, I decided to take a more holistic approach to therapy, doing body and energy work, anything I could try to heal the trauma in my body. I started having this vision where I was so gross, covered in dirt and soil, and there were vines and flowers,” she revealed in the interview. “My first reaction to that was: ‘I’m having a vision of myself as a decaying corpse.’ But as I noticed the feelings in my body, I realized that I was very much alive. All of the things I was feeling were truths that I really had not accepted until this point. And as I was waking up to them and feeling the pain, these beautiful things were growing out of it. Floral imagery became really vital to me. I started to fill my home up with flowers and living things. Sometimes I keep dead flowers around me too.”