After a powerful preview clip of Sinead O’Connor on Dr. Phil was released earlier this month, more footage from the singer’s candid conversation has been released. The hour long sit-down is part of the show’s upcoming sixteenth season premiere and O’Connor believes that her appearance can help de-stigmatize mental illness across all platforms.
“I’m hoping that we can save some lives,” she says about openly discussing her mental health struggles. “There is a certain group of people who are absolutely afraid to open their mouth about mental illness and those are rockers, people in the entertainment business. Famous people. I think it’s important that those of us in the entertainment industry begin to open up.”
During the course of the interview, numerous topics were broached from suicidal thoughts, to her mother’s abuse of Sinead and her brother when they were children, and how a radical hysterectomy in 2015 triggered years of her own personal instability. “I was told to leave the hospital two days after the surgery with Tylenol and no hormone replacements and no guidance as to what might happen to me,” she said. “I was flung into surgical menopause. So hormones were everywhere and I became very suicidal. I was a basket case.”
O’Connor admits to feeling like an “imposter” during the height of her career when her cover of Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” shot to No. 1 and made her a global sensation. “I couldn’t understand why people loved my songs, the songs I wrote,” she said. “That was the Prince song. Of course everybody loves it. I felt like an imposter because people loved the album, that was shocking to me. I’d be doing the gigs and people would be going mental and I’m thinking, ‘Why are they going mental?’ I felt like an imposter, which is what a lot of musicians feel. A lot of musicians will tell you the same thing. Soon as you get off stage, you’re the a**hole you always are.”
The Irish songstress reached out to Dr. Phil to help place her in a long-term treatment facility after her suicidal episodes in 2016. You can watch clips of the interview up top.
