General Hospital’s Former Michael Opens Up About the Shattering Health Battle That Followed His Firing: ‘I Couldn’t Function’

All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Soaps.com may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.

Doctors have long known about the link between mental and physical health. It’s something that General Hospital’s Maurice Benard (Sonny) talks about quite a bit, both in his own life and as he chats with guests on his vlog, State of Mind.

When Drew Garrett — who played Sonny’s son Michael before Chad Duell stepped in — caught up with Benard on State of Mind, he opened up about his health battle after leaving General Hospital, and how it shattered him physically and mentally.

“My mental state is pretty level,” Garrett began, “but I’ve had physical health challenges that have put my mental state in a place of deep reflection and sensitivity. And emotionally unbalanced, for sure.”

That challenge came from eczema. It’s an autoimmune disease that can develop into something far, far more crippling than people might realize.

He’d developed eczema as a kid and was given topical steroids — think the hydrocortisone that you can pick up at the pharmacy, but stronger. This is the kind you can only get with prescriptions. Eventually, though, as happens with a lot of medications, the steroids lost their effectiveness. Garrett’s body became dependent on them, the eczema never went away and just kept getting worse no matter what he put on.

At the same time, “If I didn’t use it,” the actor explained, “it was like waking up a beast.”

Eventually he realized he needed a different approach, so he started looking into what he ate, his lifestyle, what he was exposed to, what he had in his home. He was looking for the cause of his eczema, rather than just trying to tamp down the symptoms. Symptoms that were making life miserable.

“As I began to dive into that process,” Garrett noted, “I had to get off the steroids. And getting off those steroids — that process was terrible. What happens is you get off them, it’s like a synthetic hormone, so you’re supplying your body with these things that it otherwise isn’t creating because it’s like you got a crutch.

“It was like a firestorm on my skin when I got off,” Garrett shared. “My skin became super inflamed. And when I say ‘super,’ if you would have seen me during this process — and this was years, years — if you would have seen me, you would have immediately thought, ‘Poor guy. What’s going on? He doesn’t look well.’”

His eyes were swollen shut, his skin was on fire and he was, he eventually realized, dealing with Topical Steroid Withdrawal, or TSW. “If you look up online, people are out there looking like burn victims trying to get off these,” he shared. “Like peeling layers on layers of skin. You look frightening. It looks terrible and it feels worse.”

And no one warned him about it. As Garret put it, “I had no idea. I was just a kid just doing what the doctor says. So I was on steroids all throughout General Hospital that was keeping it at bay. Towards the tail end of my run on GH, I started to try to get off them, and that ended up being a 10-year process.”

Back in 2009, Lexi Ainsworth and Garrett played the sibling duo of Kristina and Michael.

Credit: John Paschal/JPI

While dealing with the crippling withdrawal, he started painstakingly eliminating things from his diet to figure out what worked and what didn’t for his body. Everyone is different and what causes one person to react, may not be the same as another.

“I have to be super disciplined with what I expose my body to,” he explained now. “What’s cool is I became incredibly educated and incredibly informed as far as nutrition, as far as environmental factors, as far as products. I spent countless hours, cuz I was determined. I was like, ‘I’m not going to stay on this drug and I’m not going to accept that this is just how I wake up and how I feel, which was terrible. I couldn’t function.”

And worse, he was still actively trying to pursue an acting career, but couldn’t even show up to auditions without looking terrifying. “I remember I read for Spider-Man, and my eyes were almost swollen shut. I was red in the face, peeling.” And it didn’t end with his face. That’s just what folks saw when he went out and about and tried keeping up with acting.

“I’m a pretty happy dude,” Garrett confessed, “but during those times, that was the first time — one of the only times I thought to myself, ‘You know what? I can relate to people who feel like they might just want to end it.’ Because it’s like, at what point do I get relief? At what point do I find an answer to this state?”

These days, he’s beaten the TSW and keeps the eczema under control by watching what he eats. But to reach the point he did, is so painful and difficult. We’re just glad that Garrett’s been recovering and can hopefully put that nightmare behind him for good, as he lives his life to the fullest now.