“Back then, my life was spiralling out of control.”
Frankie Bridge has written about her hospitalisation in a psychiatric ward due to depression and anxiety.
The Saturdays star said that she suffered silently with her mental health for years, too fearful to ask for help.
Writing in her memoir, Open: Why Asking For Help Can Save Your Life, she detailed her admission to Nightingale Hospital in London during her time in the band.
“I was so profoundly unhappy and so afraid of who I’d become — and what I was capable of doing to myself — that I just wanted someone, anyone, to make it all go away,” reads an extract published in Mail Online.
“For as long as I can remember I had suffered from anxiety, nervousness, the big black cloud, stress, low moods, sadness.”
Frankie recalled filming the video for ‘My Hearts Take Over,’ a time when she hit rock bottom. She flew back from Iceland where her boyfriend at the time, Wayne, was waiting for her.
She said that he took her straight to hospital. Initially, she didn’t even tell her family that she was there.
“The shame of having to admit to my parents and sister Victoria that my beautiful life wasn’t enough for me, that I’d failed to function as a normal human being,” she wrote.
“I knew they would blame themselves and question their decision to let me go into the music industry when I was a child.”
This isn’t the first time that Frankie has spoken about her mental health issues.
Last year, she told the Verified Views podcast that her time spent in hospital was a “God send.”
“You can feel like it controls you and that’s what had happened to me,” she said.
“I felt I had control over it at one point and all of sudden I didn’t. For me, knowledge was the key to understand what’s happening to your body physically when you’re having a panic attack.”
You can read Frankie’s extract in full here.
