MasterChef winner Julie Goodwin has opened up about her personal health struggles after admitting to media she spent five weeks in a mental health facility.
The star initially rose to fame on the Network Ten cooking competition as the lovable mother-of-three with a talent for creating comforting foods with a graceful twist.
However, Goodwin has had her own personal struggles with mental health and admitted to fans in February that she had spent a number of weeks in a mental health facility after experiencing such severe depression, she couldn’t eat or sleep.
The reality star described the pain as feeling like she was “trapped under a wet woollen blanket” in a private letter to fans that she penned to describe her absence from her radio show Rabbit and Julie Goodwin.
She went on to say, “every move was a massive effort” and that anxiety “kept coursing through me like electricity. Eventually all of this became so much that I just had nothing left.”
While sitting down with Lisa Wilkinson for The Sunday Project, she admitted it was a “shock” after finding herself in a dark place.
“I found myself in hospital having suffered a massive episode of depression and anxiety and a whole lot of stuff I couldn’t manage … It was quite a shock to me to land there,” she told Wilkinson.
“It wasn’t just a feeling, it became physical. My hands shook so hard that I couldn’t put a fork full of food to my mouth … I wasn’t sleeping.”
Goodwin found hope through her husband, Mick for making the decision to take her to hospital.
“He just said to me, I’m not equipped to deal with what you’re going through right now, and I need some help with this,” she explained.
“If I hadn’t been taken there, I don’t know where I’d be now.”
Julie says she was treated as an inpatient in a mental health unit after being assessed by a psychiatrist and what was meant to be three weeks in hospital, turned into three.
Throughout it all stood her loyal husband Michael.
“What I know from like the very centre of my soul is that he is looking out for me and that his motivation is my wellbeing,” she said of her partner of 25 years.
Goodwin went on to admit she felt all the joy she’d had was “gone”.
“I was stuck in a situation of my own creation and I couldn’t get out, I couldn’t see a way out. And it wasn’t that I didn’t want to alive anymore, but I couldn’t figure out how to be alive.
“I just had voices that were despairing and dark and wrong, telling me the wrong things.”
The MasterChef winner said her kids and husband “just rallied around and I guess … I slowly, incrementally got better.
“You know it wasn’t the end of the world. I’m not that important, I’m a cog in a wheel and we all need a break sometimes.”
