“9-1-1”’s Ryan Guzman opens up about suicide attempt, urges men to seek help: ‘Lean on your brother’
“I’ve taken each step as an opportunity to erase what got me there,” the actor says of moving forward.
Ryan Guzman has long been candid about his mental health struggles, but now the 9-1-1 star is opening up about a “mental health crisis” that led him to attempt suicide.
“About six and a half, seven years ago…I tried, at one point in time, to take my own life,” the 36-year-old says in a preview clip from the May 21 episode of Tommy DiDario’s I’ve Never Said This Before podcast. “Luckily it didn’t work. Luckily I got a second chance, by the grace of God.”
In the preview clip, which debuted Monday exclusively on PEOPLE, DiDario asks Guzman if there’s anything he’s never revealed before that he’d like to share on the podcast. After a long pause, Guzman admits “I had been hesitant to actually say any of this for so long because, you know, it’s been years upon years…I’ve really never said this out loud, especially onto a public platform.”
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The actor says that moment and the death of his friend and Step Up franchise costar tWitch, who died by suicide in 2022, “are probably the two biggest fundamental moments of my entire life and have allowed me to have a deeper sense of mercy and empathy towards every individual.”
This revelation comes just days after Guzman posted a video of himself dancing as a tribute to tWitch. “Since Step Up, I’ve been so afraid to dance. For fear of being judged on the principle, I played a professional dancer in a movie and was held to a standard of dance I couldn’t uphold,” he captioned the video. “It was Twitches [sic] voice in my head that reminded me to get out of my head and dance for the fun of it. Laugh at yourself. Be goofy. Mess up. But most of all, be vulnerable and feel the music. In your honor Twitch, I danced for the first time in a long time n let go of the fear. God bless you, brother.”
Guzman — who has also explored mental health on 9-1-1, with his firefighter character dealing with severe PTSD from his time as an army medic — hopes that by opening up about his struggles, he will inspire others, particularly men, to seek help if they are struggling: “I would implore that all men renounce this fact of ‘You’re a tough man, you have to hold all this in,’ but lean on your brother,” he says on the podcast.
As for his own darkest moment, Guzman looks back at it as a turning point toward the positive, telling DiDario that “from that moment forward, I’ve taken each step as an opportunity to erase what got me there and build on what allowed me to live for.”
