Stephanie Pratt Reveals Descent into Bulimia and Drug Addiction: 'I Didn't Care About Anything. I Could Live or Die'

The Hills showed viewers Stephanie Pratt growing out of her teens and into a young woman. But as her new biography reveals, the six seasons of the glossy show didn’t touch on her very real struggles, including addiction to crystal meth and bulimia.

In Made in Reality, Pratt admits to becoming addicted to crystal meth when she was only 16 or 17 and attending Crossroads School for Arts & Science, a private college prep school in Santa Monica, California.

“I was on the extreme level, and addiction developed instantly,” Pratt says in the current issue of New! magazine. The former reality star – who writes that she kept her meth kit in a Hello Kitty bag – tells the magazine, “[I smoked] probably four times before school, then at snack … probably 12 or 13 times a day.”

Although she now knows she was “in the grips of a full-blown addiction,” Pratt writes that, at the time, “I felt confident. I felt like I was a supermodel. I had been so depressed before for so long, and suddenly I felt alive again. I felt so happy,” adding, “I got thinner, I felt better with my body image.”

When her family finally found out about her crystal meth use, she writes that her brother, Spencer, was the first to confront her, demanding that she take a urine test. Pratt went to rehab for meth and says she never tried it again but admits she continued to experiment with other drugs, including cocaine. Pratt tells the magazine using the drug made her feel “rebellious and grown-up.”

Although she had quit meth and was starting to feel better, the depression that Pratt began experiencing in her mid-teens still plagued her.

“The inner core of sadness and anxiety that I wasn’t perfect or even normal remained,” she writes. “And for as long as it did, I suppose there was going to be a part of me that still was going to numb those sensations.”

“I didn’t care about anything. I could live or die, I didn’t care,” Pratt tells New!. “I had nothing to get out of bed for. Nothing was exciting.”

On her 19th birthday, Pratt says she had a “serious depressive episode” and attempted suicide by taking a mix of Oxycontin, Xanax, cocaine, marijuana and whiskey. Thankfully, her mother unexpectedly showed up to her apartment and called for help before it was too late.

But Pratt, now 29, says her drug use continued even after this and later prompted her 2006 shoplifting arrest in Hawaii.

“I woke up handcuffed to a hospital bed,” Pratt says. “When I landed back in L.A., Mom took me back home, and I went upstairs to my old bedroom, and I felt so much shame.”

Pratt says she overcame her addiction during another stint in rehab later that year, but when she joined the cast of The Hills in 2007, she developed bulimia and had dropped to nearly 100 lbs. by the end of 2009.

“I lost about 6 lbs. in two weeks, but bulimia made my face very puffy so I freaked out and began going on crazy little diets,” she said. “Like, I’d only eat Tic Tacs.”

Today, Pratt says she is healthy, eating well and exercising regularly. She currently lives in London, where she has been appearing on the British reality series Made in Chelsea since 2013.