Shirley Ballas confesses why she thought she was ‘better off dead’
Shirley Ballas has revealed that she has severely struggled with her mental health.
The Strictly Come Dancing judge has become an advocate for mental health in recent years, after her brother David took his own life in 2003, at the age of 44.
Now, in a new update, Shirley has noted the extent to which she has battled with her own mental health.
In an excerpt from her upcoming book, Best Foot Forward, the 64-year-old admitted that she was “anxious, depressed and desolate” in her fifties, as she was going through the menopause.
“I thought I was losing the plot. In my darkest hours I went to some terrible places in my head and while I hate to use the word suicidal, those thoughts crossed my mind,” the dancing star confessed.
“I could never have gone through with it because I wouldn't want my mother to suffer the agony of losing a second child to suicide, but there were certainly times when I thought I'd be better off dead because the way I was living felt so hideous,” she explained.
“I'd been trying to manage the 'situation' myself with antidepressants, sleeping tablets, more medication to wake myself up and, I have to say this, alcohol,” she noted, adding that she was previously “never a boozer” but that it quickly became “a crutch”.
“I knew it was becoming a problem. I’d developed a dependency on that evening bottle of red and I was doing all this in private, hiding the extent of my distress from my family,” Shirley recalled.
“It was my son who realised first. ‘OK, Mum,’ he said, ‘let’s talk about where we can get you some help,’” she shared, before confirming that she visited a doctor in California.
“[The doctor] gently told me that this was all to do with my hormones, which was news to me. It was the first time I’d considered that as a possible cause,” Shirley wrote, reflecting that she noticed a change after “several weeks” of treatment.
Shirley concluded: “Whenever I have days where behind the eyes there’s emptiness and all I want to do is come home, take a pill and go to bed, even now I struggle to share that with anyone. I just get through the day and hope that I wake up feeling brighter in the morning.”
