I completely lost my mind: Actress reveals mental health ordeal
Sharon Horgan has said she “lost her mind completely” and developed anxiety while filming her TV comedy Divorce.
The Irish actress and comedian, 50, created and was executive producer for the HBO series, which premiered in 2016 and starred Sarah Jessica Parker and Thomas Haden Church as a middleaged divorcing couple.
Appearing on Desert Island Discs, Horgan tells how spending five months in Brooklyn, New York, away from her then-husband Jeremy Rainbird and two daughters, took a toll on her mental health. She said: “I lost my mind completely and I got OCD from it. I developed anxiety.
“I would lie in bed at night and I would feel my heart going and I would think: ‘Oh, I am about to have a heart attack’. It was only afterwards that I realised it was anxiety.
“I didn’t not see my kids for five months. Every couple of weeks I would go back or they would come over. But it was still ridiculously long and painful. It was awful but it was a choice we made as a family and lots of good things came out of it. It certainly messed me up for a while and I wouldn’t want to do it again.” The actress recalled how she met up with her family in Austin, Texas, for Christmas but broke her ankle jumping on a trampoline. “It was terrible,” she said. “I went back on set and I was an even more annoying presence because I would be walking up to people on crutches giving them notes.”
Horgan and Rainbird divorced in 2019 after 14 years. She told host Lauren Laverne co-parenting had made her question whether she was a good mother. “I was a fun mum for years,” she said.
“I entirely thought that was my role but that changes when you co-parent. It had some dips in the middle where I thought, ‘Oh, that thing I thought I was, which was a good mother, I am not entirely sure about’. When you bring anything like that into your kid’s life it’s tricky, when you turn the roles upside down, but it balances out and everything eased back.”
Her music choices on Desert Island Discs include David Bowie’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide, The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead and Kate Bush’s Moments Of Pleasure. For her book Horgan chose The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway.