GMA Meteorologist Opens Up About Horrific Suicide Attempt: 'It Wasn't Worth Living'
Dec. 5 2017, Published 1:27 p.m. ET
ABC News' beloved chief meteorologist Ginger Zee, tried to kill herself when she was just 21, RadarOnline.com has learned.
In an exclusive interview with PEOPLE, the TV personality claimed that during her early years, she suffered from debilitating depression, which led her to lock herself in a bathroom and take every pill she could find.
"I'd lost all hope," said the GMA star. "I just shut down. It wasn't worth living. I was wasting people's time and space."
Speaking of her mental illness, Zee, 36, said: "Depression for me has been a couple of different things — but the first time I felt it, I felt helpless, hopeless and things I had never felt before."
Of her suicide attempt, she added: "I lost myself and my will to live."
Soon after she'd taken the pills – mostly large quantities of Benadryl – her roommate and boyfriend at the time realized what she'd done and rushed her to the hospital to get the drugs out of her system. Luckily, it worked, and she survived.
While she was glad to be alive, Zee then had to face her clinical depression. In her new book, Natural Disaster: I Cover Them. I Am One, she speaks of the struggles she had to overcome after the incident, always reminding readers that no matter the severity of one's sadness, there is always a solution.
"It doesn't matter what's relative to another person's tragedy, or whatever it is that's making you feel low," she continued in her interview "In that moment, my brain, and probably a chemical somewhere within me, said, 'You need to kill yourself.' The only voices I could hear were telling me, 'You are not worth it.'"
"It's very weird how that works," she added. "I didn't question it. I didn't sit there and think about it. I just went for it. It's scary, the way your mind can overpower what is real and what is right. Now as a mother, to think that that could be my child? That is frightening."
Zee said that due to her battle with anorexia and narcolepsy as a teen, she took various strong medications, which she believes also added to her depression and led her to try and take her own life.
She claimed that ten days before starting her job at GMA, she checked herself into a mental-facility and began seeing a therapist to work on her issues.
"My professional life, in a strange way, has always been going up, up, up, while my personal life was just the complete opposite," she said, and she wanted to change that, all while maintaining her incredible career.
"I was in this place where I knew my personal life could affect this outstanding job and opportunity that I had," she concluded. "For the first time in a long time, I wanted to live and I knew that."
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Now, Ginger Zee is a happily married mother. She told PEOPLE that seeing a psychologist has certainly helped her and that having a son has entirely changed her perspective on life. What do you think of her shocking confession? Sound off in the comments below.
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