X FACTOR star Janet Devlin has revealed how she has been battling with mental ill health since the age of 11.
In a new interview the singer also admitted it took her EIGHT YEARS to find the courage to seek the help she needed.
Speaking exclusively to GB News, Janet, 27, from County Tyrone, Northern Ireland said: “The first time I reached out for help, I was 19 but I wasn’t ready for it, because as an alcoholic you have to be willing to get better.
“You can actually start doing that and I wasn’t but when I was 20 I finally hit that rock bottom and I went in [for treatment] and that was when I finally started to get better.”
Janet outlined her experiences in a candid interview with GB News’ Mark Dolan.
Opening about her problems, she said she’s battled a lifelong fight with depression, started self-harming at the age of 11 and was diagnosed as anorexic at 12.
Janet also said that it was only last year that she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and bipolar II disorder.
“I was addicted to benzodiazepines, which are used for sleep,” she said. “I was addicted to these sleeping pills for about seven years, and I was casually overdosing on them.”
Janet said her musical talents emerged at an early age, playing the tin whistle and the fiddle in a band, before developing an interest in drumming.
She described her experience with X Factor as “incredible”.
She added: “To put it in perspective, I was flying to the judges house in Miami and I was doing my psychology homework on the plane. It was all very surreal because I was 16 so I didn’t really have much of a concept of what was going on. But I was in a really bad place in the sense that I had a lot of depression and things like that going on…
I didn’t have a lot of self belief but that’s what the show gave me.”
Janet appeared on X Factor in 2011 reaching the Quarter Finals – despite Simon Cowell tipping her to win on several occasions that year.
In 2020, during lockdown, she released a ‘warts-and-all’ memoir, titled My Confessional.
She is currently in the middle of a new tour – called It’s Not That Deep – and is working on new music while also pursuing a career in TV documentaries following the success of her acclaimed Young, Female and Addicted.
In it, she spoke candidly about her own battle with alcoholism and interviewed other young women affected directly or indirectly from across Northern Ireland.
“The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and my DMs (direct messages) are still flooded to this day with people reaching out and looking for help and guidance,” she enthuses, speaking on the phone from her base in London.
“The documentary put everything out there, so I did feel a bit nervous, how people would react, but I really wanted to shine a light on how many young women struggle with alcohol.
“I enjoyed making it and the production company would like to do some more, so we’re currently looking at a list of other topics.
“It seems to have touched a lot of people which is exactly what you want with a programme like that.”
