DANIEL O’DONNELL’S wife Majella is to reveal how she believes she has beaten the depression that has haunted her life for years.
The bubbly mum-of-two reveled earlier this year how she has battled the condition for years and even considered committing suicide.
But Majella has now told RTE’s Would You Believe programme that she has never felt better.
Majella recently released her own album of songs and now regularly performs on stage.
She recently performed at the Harvey’s Point Cabaret Evening and was a huge attraction.
However the Co Mayo woman revealed recently how she sat on a toilet seat clutching rosary beads and trying to find a way to go on as she battled depression.
She has resigned herself to taking anti-depressants for the rest of her life to cope with her illness.
She even ended up desperately contacting social services to help her care for her three year old daughter, Siobhan, during one of her blackest periods.
The 50 year old, who divides her time with husband Daniel between Kincasslagh and Tenerife, says she is now on top of the world but she has learned she needs medication to treat her disease.
She revealed she first had suicidal thoughts when her marriage was falling apart in England in the early nineties.
“It is the most dreadful disease you could possibly have. You are in this hole and it’s way, way down and everyone else is at the top. Nobody can do anything for you, absolutely nobody.
“You hear people who have committed suicide and people saying ‘why didn’t they come to me?’
“But you genuinely believe the world would be much better without you including your children. I did with mine.
“I honesty believed if I was gone their lives would much more…of course they would miss me for a few months but then they wouldn’t have this constant mad woman that’s down
“I just thought so many times I’m better off out of this. I did consider (suicide) numerous times but I didn’t have the guts to go through with it.
“I had it since my teens and early twenties but I didn’t get medication. I read books and went to see a psychologist and tried positive affirmations.
“I went to the doctor and told him I couldn’t be depressed because I was a positive thinker and I read books.
“He said ‘Majella, it’s like saying I can’t have blood pressure because I’ve read books’.
“He said it was a chemical imbalance and I needed something to balance it. I haven’t been (depressed) since I started taking the anti-depressants. Thanks be to God. I was very lucky and they worked great for me.”
She said she decided to wean herself off her tablets shortly after marrying Daniel but the depression returned.
She said: “After I married I thought ‘This is fantastic. I have no more worries, I love this man to bits, he loves me. We’ve a great life. Surely to God I don’t need these’.
“I start to wean myself of them slowly, slowly but surely. I remember Daniel was in the middle of a really big tour in England and I hit the bottom again.
“I found myself with a pair of rosary beads sitting on a toilet at half past four in the morning in a hotel in London rocking back and forth and crying and praying.
“I said ‘Please God don’t let me go down there again.’ Daniel just said then ‘Please go back on them and don’t ever come off them again’.
“I don’t think I will. I think that’s it for life.”
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