General Hospital’s Chris McKenna tells Maurice Benard of Shared Bipolar Disorder Diagnosis

On General Hospital, costars Chris McKenna and Maurice Benard’s characters may be on opposite sides of the law, but the actors have more in common than they may have previously realized.

General Hospital’s Chris McKenna on State of Mind

As most fans of General Hospital know, Maurice Benard (Sonny Corinthos) has a podcast called State of Mind, where he has costars and other soap actors discuss their mental health on the State of Mind podcast. On this week’s episode, his guest was Chris McKenna, who plays GH’s Jack Brennan, and viewers discovered they had more in common than their work.

Per People, on the December 21st episode of State of Mind, McKenna told Benard that during COVID, he realized that the lockdown was having a severe effect on his mental health. During the podcast, he reveals publicly for the first time that he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder — a diagnosis he says he needed his whole life.

McKenna shares during the show that he had his first breakdown when I was a teenager and then lived his whole life with this disorder undiagnosed. “Which is fascinating in retrospect,” he says. McKenna told Benard of struggles he’s had with drugs and alcohol, and mood swings with extreme highs and lows, which were triggered during the pandemic.

Benard could relate, as he has publicly shared his journey with the same disorder. He asked McKenna what he wanted to share and how he was doing now. McKenna said, “I’m doing good right now. It hasn’t always been the case, but I’m good right now.”

McKenna told Benard of some episodes he had growing up, and that during COVID’s lockdown, he had his “first dangerous depression since [I was] a teenager, which was followed by a manic psychotic episode which required hospitalization.”

You can watch Maurice Benard’s State of Mind show with Chris McKenna as a guest on Sunday, December 21, on YouTube.