“Within one year, Michelle Trachtenberg, Daveigh Chase and Hayden Panettiere have died. DIED! Three former female child actors of the same generation are gone,” said Melissa Gilbert.

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This post discusses addiction and mental health.

After One Life to Live, Hayden starred on Guiding Light from the age of 7, before appearing in A Bug's Life, Ally McBeal, and Malcolm in the Middle throughout her childhood.

As she got more and more famous, Hayden started drinking and taking opioids. She said, “My saving grace is that I couldn't be messy while on set and working. But things kept getting out of control [off set]. And as I got older, the drugs and alcohol became something I almost couldn't live without.”

Hayden’s alcohol dependency worsened after she experienced postpartum depression. She entered treatment for the first time when her daughter, Kaya, was 4 months old, and later entered again amid the shooting of the ABC series Nashville.

“They are gone and the question I have been turning over and over in my head is, ‘WHY?.’ Why are these three sweet, wildly talented, vibrant, vital young women gone?” she said, adding that the deaths felt especially personal to her because she shared Michelle, Daveigh, and Hayden’s experience of being a child actor.

Melissa added, “I even nearly worked to death a few times. At twenty-two, I had an emergency appendectomy right in the middle of shooting a movie of the week in Portland Oregon. I felt so bad that I was affecting the schedule, I went back to work three days later. A few days after that I got sick with a horrible fever. I continued to film a few more days until I finished my work, flew home and was immediately hospitalized hallucinating from the fever. I was on the verge of sepsis.”

“These young professionals are children, and we should make sure they are allowed to be children. They should be allowed to say ‘no.’ Not push through physical or emotional pain. Not be made to support their entire families. And most certainly not to be followed everywhere they go by cameras, phones and prying, exploitive eyes,” she wrote.