Mischa Barton Blames Wisdom Teeth for Her Meltdown

She has described her recent troubles and being placed on psychiatric hold as “a perfect storm,” and now Mischa Barton is offering further details of her July hospitalization to the women of ABC’s The View. In an appearance due to air Friday, she blames the problem on pain associated with wisdom-tooth surgery.

Calling her hospitalization “silly,” despite being “completely overwhelmed” by her situation, the former O.C. actress, 23, trying to deflect attention away from the subject, says on the program, “I mean, really, it was blown out of proportion, so it’s kind of silly now to be talking about it because I’m so fine now, but it was really just a bad time for me,” ABC News reports.

When the View‘s headmistress, Barbara Walters, however, notes that the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center psychiatric ward was not just any facility, Barton shifts gears and then blames dental work gone wrong.

Wisdom Teeth Pain

“Right, I mean, it was just … I was overwhelmed,” says Barton. “I had too much work going on. I had a surgery for my wisdom teeth that went really badly. I had been in the hospital. I had two surgeries on my wisdom teeth. I had four taken out and they had gotten it really badly wrong. They had to drill into my jaw and I was just in really excruciating pain.”

PHOTOS: Mischa On Set of The Beautiful Life
She continues: “I had an infection and a dry socket and I woke up on a Sunday morning and there was no doctor available. I was trying to take the minimum amount of painkillers and get through it because I had to go to work soon and I was getting ready to go do this show, The Beautiful Life, and meanwhile I still had a schedule to travel.

“I was going to Europe. I was going to London. I had things to do and I was prepping to do photo shoots and I was just overwhelmed. I had so much work to do and the surgery had gone so badly for me. And I think that I was just starting to feel completely overwhelmed. It was just too much to have this surgery go so wrong.”

Fear of Needles

This leads View co-host Joy Behar to inquire why a psychiatric hospital handled her case, when her pain was physical. In a non sequitor, Barton responds: “When they take you into the hospital for something when it goes really wrong if you’re having a meltdown and you say something like ‘I feel like I want to die’ … they start injecting you with things to calm down. Like I’m petrified of needles. Like absolutely petrified … you can’t come anywhere … I had my blood drawn once in my life for my insurance.”

Barton now insists all is well. “I just figure that if you hit rock bottom like that … and you’re around people, you know, you realize I’m nothing like these people,” she says, before going into a fairly rambling recap of her experience.

“Anyway, I got really healthy since then,” Barton adds. “I’ve just been doing everything I can to keep my job happy and healthy and I’ve moved to New York with my two dogs and I have a great apartment I just got.”