Céline Dion has revealed she took near-lethal levels of Valium as she battled her illness, Stiff Person Syndrome, which she was diagnosed with in December 2022, the symptoms of which had been present for some time. The 56-year-old Canadian singer told NBC News in an exclusive interview that, before her diagnosis, the muscle spasms she suffered from were so severe that she began taking potentially lethal amounts of prescription drugs.
A year after canceling her tour due to illness, Dion said that during the ten years of testing doctors needed to arrive at the correct diagnosis, she had become dependent on the relief provided by increasingly higher doses of the sedative anxiolytic based on diazepam.
“I didn’t know, honestly, that it could kill me. I would take, like, before a show, 20 milligrams of Valium, and then, just walking from my dressing room to backstage, it was gone,” Dion said, describing how quickly with which the pain relief faded. “At a certain point, the fact is that my body got used to 20, 30 and 40 drops. It relaxed my whole body. For two weeks, for a month, the show went on, but then you get used to it and it doesn’t work more”.
At a certain point the singer took 90 milligrams of the drug a day, he also told NBC News, to relieve the muscle spasms due to the disorder, which can be so intense that they break a rib as they spread through the body. Dion recounted the moments when the disorder became apparent to her and her team during the 2008 Taking Chances Would Tour, before a concert in Germany. “I told my assistants and my collaborators, ‘I don’t know if I can do the show. I don’t know what’s going on,'” she recalled in the interview. “I was very, very, very scared. And then you panic, and the more you panic, the more you spasm. I went on stage…naturally. And I started singing more nasally.” It was decided that this vocal flaw would be “compensated for” by “lowering the songs a bit in key and projecting more nasality – and hope”.
Céline Dion, who hasn’t been on stage since March 2020, when Covid forced her to interrupt concerts: The silver lining of the pandemic was that the singer had time to regain control of her health and reduce her dangerous dependency on medications. “It was an opportunity for me to take a break,” she said in the interview. “And to be smart. I stopped everything with the help of the doctors. I was stopping taking all the drugs, especially the bad ones. I stopped everything because it wasn’t working anymore.”
However, Dion and her team of doctors continued to struggle to find out what exactly was happening to her body. And even though she never took the stage again, her symptoms persisted. Then in the winter of 2022 the definitive diagnosis: stiff person syndrome. Dion has been working with her medical team and said she is determined to return to singing. “I’ll be back on stage, even if I have to crawl, I will,” she assured.
