Debby Ryan has gone public with details of a brain injury she describes as life-altering, one that came after five separate concussions and left her unable to fully return to who she was before.

The former Disney Channel star, who played Bailey Pickett on Suite Life on Deck and later fronted her own show Jessie, spoke about it on the September 15 episode of Mythical Kitchen's Last Meals, a conversation later reported by Variety and OK! Magazine.

"I had a pretty crazy, life-altering brain injury a few years ago, and I was out of commission for like six months, and I went to this neurological rehab for like six months," Ryan said. She called the fifth concussion different from the rest, the result of "sustained shaking over a minute of time," and said it made everything worse.

Ryan has spent years managing migraines she calls hellish, describing herself as a "migraine warrior." But the brain injury pushed things further. She says the world now feels louder and brighter than it should, and that she often has to shut her eyes just to think straight.

"The visual data I am taking in can be so distracting and so loud," she said. "If there is a thing that can make things really singular, I like that."

To recover, Ryan tried what she called a "fringe science treatment," one she has since repeated more than once. It got her, in her words, "back online." Not all the way, though. "There are some things that just did not come back," she said, and that's how she now splits her life in two, pre-incident Debby and post-incident Debby.

She credits the people around her, particularly her husband Josh Dun, for holding steady through a version of her that shifted without warning. The two married in 2019 and welcomed a daughter, Felix, earlier this year, now eight months old.

"I couldn't imagine doing it," Ryan said of watching someone you love change from the outside, "going like, 'Wow, I guess that looks like my wife, and she's talking like my wife,' and then suddenly behavior's completely different."

Ryan didn't specify when the injury occurred or offer a diagnosis beyond what she described on the podcast, and neither Variety nor OK! Magazine reported additional medical detail. What's clear from her account is that this isn't a closed chapter. She's still doing the treatment. She's still figuring out what came back and what didn't, six months of rehab later, with a toddler and a husband keeping track of both versions of her along the way.