Culture

Ricki Lake opens up about 'dark times' and healing after her husband’s suicide: 'I now truly love myself the way he loved me'

Ricki Lake discusses healing after her late husband's suicide and changing the stigma of mental illness on "The View," March 6, 2019.
Nicolette Cain/ABC

March 06, 2019, 7:44 PM

TV personality and producer Ricki Lake shared her journey through grief to love and happiness two years after her husband, Christian Evans, committed suicide.

Lake detailed her experience with grief, recovery, finding love, the stigma of mental illness on "The View" on Wednesday.

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"He was bipolar," Lake said of her late husband Evans. "Yet he was my favorite person I've ever known."

Evans took his own life on Feb. 11, 2017. Lake released a statement on Instagram following the news of his death, saying that Evans had been battling bipolar disorder for years.

Lake said that she wants to "change the stigma" around mental illness.

"Losing him has been a journey for me. I mean really, there's been some dark times."

The two eloped in April 2012, but Evan's manic episodes ushered them to divorce in 2016, according to Lake's 2017 Instagram post.

"I am in a better place," Lake disclosed. "I now truly love myself the way he loved me, which is on a whole other level."

At the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour in Pasadena on Feb. 6, Lake revealed she "found a brilliant new love" that makes her "really happy."

Lake, 50, told "The View" co-hosts that she believes her late husband would give "two thumbs up" to her newfound love because she's in a better place now.

“I had to go through the darkness to get back to the light,” Lake continued.

Just as Lake wants to "change the stigma" attached to mental illness, she also wants to do the same for cannabis use for health purposes.

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Lake's documentary, "Weed the People," picks up where her late husband's passion project left off. Evans looked into it to help with his own struggles with mental illness as well as the suffering his grandfather was experiencing with bone cancer. The film follows five children treated with medical marijuana through five years of cancer treatments.

"This plant —- we need to be deprogrammed about it," Lake said on the show. "It is a human rights issue. We all need to understand that this is a medicine and the fact that for thousands of years it was a medicine ... only for the last 75 years it's become illegal."

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