Melissa Tkautz confesses: ‘My mental illness almost destroyed me’
With a great marriage and a career comeback in full swing, singer and actor Melissa Tkautz seems to have it all. But behind her wide smile is a tortured past that she’s only now confident enough to speak about.
The one-time E-street star, 43, reveals there have been times she could barely leave her house as a result of suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) from a young age.
“My first recollection that something wasn’t right was when I was about nine years old,” Melissa recalls. “There would be days when I couldn’t get out of bed or leave my bedroom because of the rituals I had to go through in my mind in order to leave the house.”
Obsessed with numbers and routines, Melissa believed if she didn’t do everything in even numbers, something bad would happen to her family.
“I would have to look at each poster on my wall twice – I had about 50, so it could take up to an hour,” she says. “It overcame me as a child and it was extremely stressful – I was too scared and embarrassed to tell anyone.”
Melissa recently shared her deeply personal mental-health battle on an episode of The Real Housewives of Sydney, admitting she still repeatedly checks that the oven is switched off or the fridge door is closed – and lives in fear that somehow she’s passed on her debilitating condition to her two beautiful children, Ayla, seven, and three-year-old Cuba.
“I don’t want them to go through what I went through. Not only was it agonising to the e brain, but it was s also so timeconsuming,” she e says, revealing she only understood whatat she was going through after watching a documentary on OCD when she was 17.
“Things happen in life all the time and d we have no control over it. Therapy finally helped me realise it doesn’t matter how many times I look at things or check things, that bad things won’t happen to my family!”
‘There would be days where I couldn’t leave my bedroom’