Denise Welch has shared a heartfelt post marking World Mental Health Day as she opened up on her own battle with depression and anxiety.
The Loose Women host, 66, posted a clip of herself from 1999 singing Petula Clark’s Downtown on Celebrity Stars in their Eyes.
Alongside the clip, Denise told how she was in the throws of one of the worst depressive episodes she had ever experienced.
She said: ‘Today is World Mental Health Day. Not everyone ‘looks depressed’. I was in the grips of one of my worst clinical episodes of severe depression ever when I recorded this.
‘I was self-medicating with drink and drugs, had been up all night with debilitating anxiety and fell into my mother’s arms backstage shaking and crying.
Denise Welch has shared a heartfelt post marking World Mental Health Day as she opened up on her own battle with depression and anxiety
In 2021, Denise revealed she is still battling her ‘endogenous’ depression , but her last major episode was in 2019 (pictured in 2024)
‘The ability to mask is unbelievable. If someone says they need help don’t say ‘but they look fine’.
Denise has previously reflected on her ‘terrifying’ postnatal depression that her The 1975 frontman son Matty Healy penned a song about.
Denise described how she went from looking ‘blooming’ in pregnancy to having panic attacks after giving birth, not being able to breastfeed and trying to climb out of the window of her flat.
She told Good Morning Britain in 2023: ‘Medics couldn’t tell at that time that something was wrong. I was typical blooming mum, I loved every single minute of it.
‘Then five days later I had a panic attack and lactation had stopped. I went from full breastfeeding breasts to nothing.
‘At the time I was told that only happens if a spouse or baby dies. On that day, my mum found me trying to crawl out of the window.’
She added: ‘It was honestly the most terrifying thing. People don’t want to die, they want to stop the pain.
‘Had I not had my family, I don’t know where I would have been. Matty grew up with mummy having moments of illness and when he was older he wrote She Lays Down.
Alongside the clip, Denise told how she was in the throws of one of the worst depressive episodes she had ever experienced
Denise and Matt Healy, 34, and her second and last child Louis Healy, 23, an actor. She shares them with ex-husband Tim Healy
‘I still get emotional thinking about it. I used to lie down on the floor and pray to something to help me love my child. Depression takes away your ability to love.’
Denise went on to tearfully explain that her ‘darkest moments were at the very beginning,’ when she was trying to understand post-natal depression.
She said: ‘The main thing was when I couldn’t love my child and that does affect me. When you have this baby, that you have wanted so badly, and you have no love.
‘Because what depression does is it depresses every single emotion, so it’s not striving for happiness, it’s striving for normalcy – it’s striving for the ability to be happy, to be sad, to care, to feel jealous, to feel anger, because with depression you feel nothing. 2:58
‘And that’s why you feel that life can be not worth living, unless you have a family like mine who said every day, ”You will get better”.’
In 2021, she revealed she is still battling her ‘endogenous’ depression, but her last major episode was in 2019.
For confidential support call the Samaritans on 116123 or visit a local Samaritans branch, see www.samaritans.org for details.