POP superstar ANNE-MARIE has revealed how she got to the top of the charts while battling debilitating mental health conditions – but refuses to take any medication after becoming hooked on sleeping pills.
The Rockabye singer and ED SHEERAN’s BFF is the biggest-selling debut act of 2018 and one of our most promising music exports after a string of hits like Ciao Adios, Friends and 2002.
But her on stage confidence belies a complex combination of mental health illnesses, which she opens up about in emotional detail on the new episode of my podcast The Dan Wootton Interview in order to boost others secretly suffering.
The Essex star tells me: “I suffer really badly with anxiety. I’m an empath. I have OCD. I have ADD. I have dyslexia. I have a lot of things going on in my brain. I do have problems and hopefully that helps other people.”
Empath is a psychological condition only recognised by some professionals, where sufferers take on the emotions of those around them.
Anne-Marie explains: “I embody other people’s feelings and emotions. If I see someone who’s looking sad, I automatically become very sad and low. So I have to be very aware of who I am with before certain events.”
The teenage karate champ was first diagnosed with ADD and dyslexia in college. She started to experience anxiety at around the same time, following years in the West End as a child star from when she was five-years-old in famous musicals like Les Miserables and Whistle Down the Wind.
She recalls: “I couldn’t read a paragraph of words so I had to get the teacher to read it out to me and I’d be able to take it in that way.
“Then the anxiety and stuff, I think I’ve been struggling with since I was about 14 but I never really explored it until last year.”
But after a terrifying experience where she became addicted to sleeping pills, Anne-Marie has decided to use therapy rather than drugs to try and cope with various conditions.
She recalls: “I have major sleep issues as well and I have anxiety towards sleep so I went to a sleep doctor once and he gave me pills and I got basically hooked on those and I couldn’t sleep without them.
“From that moment I was like I don’t want to take any medication for anything.”
But she was hit hard by the French terror attack at the Bataclan in November 2015, which killed 90 music fans, because Anne-Marie had been due to perform on stage six days later with RUDIMENTAL.
She says: “I think that was the time where I realised that I was dealing with things differently and I always thought I had bipolar because my emotions would switch so much.
“I was in bed for three days straight because my body couldn’t deal with what happened and that’s when I looked into being an empath, so that was the moment really that made me look into that part of my life and that was very scary.”
Bravely, Anne-Marie still agreed to perform in Brussels the day after her scheduled gig at the Bataclan, even with police warning there could be terrorists in the area.
She recalls: “Everyone was like, ‘You don’t have to do the show.’ I remember walking on stage that next day just crying because I was so scared. My shows next year in Paris are at the Bataclan, that’s going to be a massive moment.”
Anne-Marie is part of the new generation of popstars who are expected to share their lives on social media, which creates its own problems.
She says: “It’s part of the job and you have to be constantly on it and you do have to post three or four pictures a day on Instagram because if you don’t you kind of get lost in the mix of everyone.”
But she refuses to edit or airbrush the reality of her life, explaining: “I want to show people when I’m not looking good and when I’m sad and when I’m angry and when I’m looking really good.
“Which is probably how I’ve gotten through it and how I’ve been able to deal with it because if I became someone who was known to look pretty every day I would probably be insane right now.”
That’s not to say she copes with the criticism easily.
She admits: “I posted a video on another website and there was loads of comments like, ‘Oh my God, she looks 84, she looks really old’.
“This is the reason why I’m trying to show myself as real as possible because I don’t want to just pretend to look a certain way on social media then go and people are like, ‘Eurgh, you look very different.’ It’s a strange thing.”
Of course, music is an emotional outlet too, which resulted in her penning her new single, the “self-love anthem” Perfect To Me.
She says: “We decided to go to the studio and just write down all of the things that I didn’t like about myself.
“When you have problems you don’t think anyone has the same one, so when I wrote this song I honestly didn’t know that anyone would understand and it’s crazy to see how many people feel the same.”
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