Andrea McLean: ‘My secret struggles’
The Loose Women star opens up about her personal battles
She has been candid about her troubles with her three marriages, mental health struggles, the menopause and even her Botox, but Andrea McLean has now bravely revealed that she once considered taking her own life. The Loose Women presenter, 50, said that she nearly reached her tipping point last year following an argument with her current husband Nick Feeney, 47. This came shortly after she broke down in tears in front of her make-up artist Donna May Clitheroe.
“At my lowest point, I was suicidal,” Andrea said. “This is the first time I’ve admitted that. Just days after I’d collapsed on Donna, I had an argument with my husband and then went away on a work trip. It was a trivial thing, and he’d only been mildly annoyed with me, but I was in such a bad state of mind that it triggered overwhelming anxiety and other negative emotions.” She continued, “Alone in my hotel room, I wanted to end it all right then. I felt Nick couldn’t see my side of things at all – and if someone who loved me as much as he did failed to see it, then what was the point? And yet, I couldn’t do it. I lay on the floor of my room and sobbed.”
Andrea, who has been taking antianxiety medication since December 2018, said the thought of hurting Nick and her two children – son Finlay, 18, and daughter Amy, 13 – saved her. She opened up about her battles in her latest book This Girl Is On Fire, where she claimed her breakdown was triggered by the menopause and her participation on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins in 2018.
“I left the show suffering from hypothermia and in genuine shock,” she explained. “When I returned home to my normal life, I couldn’t get the trauma back in the box again.”
Burying her emotions, she focused on her website, podcast and TV appearances, which brought her “to the brink of burnout”. “I see now that I was finding no joy in anything I was doing,” she said. “I was so consumed by negativity and sadness that I hated it all and blamed everything I was feeling on my situation, the life I was living. I kept on making mistakes. I’d taken my eye off my finances, which meant I was in a bit of a mess when my tax bill arrived – another thing to be deeply ashamed of.”
‘I was in a really dark place’