Fiona Phillips has bravely opened up about one of the toughest times of her life – and revealed that it was Eamonn Holmes who alerted to her problem.
Speaking in a BBC doc The Truth About Stress, the breakfast host says that when she was appearing on Strictly Come Dancing in 2005 she was clinically depressed but didn’t realise it at the time.
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At the time she was on the show, Fiona was under immense pressure.
Not only was she still waking up at 3am everyday for her job on GMTV, her mum was in a nursing home in Wales in the final stages of Alzheimer’s, while her father had only just been diagnosed with the terrible disease.
All of this eventually began to build up and she now recognises she had become depressed.
But back then, she just carried on with life as best she could.
Even when her breakfast show co-host Eamonn Holmes saw the signs of her breakdown she said she refused to acknowledge it.
“Eamonn always used to say, ‘You are clinically depressed’ and I was saying, ‘I’m not’. I really was,” she says.
“I didn’t seek help – I didn’t have time. I kept telling myself I would be fine and kept blaming myself, saying, ‘Why can’t you manage all this?’”
With with her day job and family woes taking its toll on her, the last thing she needed was added stress. But then she agreed to take part on Strictly.
But she says she felt “pressured” to take part in the third series of Strictly in attempt to boost her career.
“I was asked to do the first series and the second,” she recalls. “Then my agent said, ‘If you don’t do it now you can say goodbye to big gigs at the BBC’, and what have you. There was real pressure.”
“So I did it but I wasn’t well enough to be doing it, mentally.
“I was doing GMTV and had the children and my parents, and I threw that into the mix and I just felt this enormous guilt. Why am I doing this when my mum’s in a home?
She says she looks back at that time as “a really traumatic episode” in her life but admits it was an amazing privilege to do it.
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Now she says she is able to try to combat her feelings of stress using mindfulness.
“It is about living in the moment which is really good for stress.
“Not looking back to the past and not looking to the future.
“I’m learning just to concentrate on deep breathing, trying to centre myself in the moment and calmly do what I have to do first…”