Monday, 24 March 2008

JK Rowling: I've thought about suicide

As a single mum, the Harry Potter author's life seemed bleak

Harry Potter author JK Rowling has admitted that she was once so low with depression, she thought about taking her own life.

It was after splitting from her first husband, Portuguese journalist Jorge Arantes, and struggling as a single mum in Edinburgh that her life seemed totally bleak.

'The thing that made me go for help was probably my daughter,' Joanne recalls. 'She was something that earthed me, grounded me, and I thought, this isn't right, this can't be right, she cannot grow up with me in this state.

'We're talking suicidal thoughts here, we're not talking "I'm a little bit miserable".'

The writer was helped by prescribed cognitve behavioural therapy to help control negative thoughts.

'I have never been remotely ashamed of having been depressed. Never,' Joanne explains in an interview with Adeel Amini, 22, for a student magazine, reports the Daily Telegraph.

'What's to be ashamed of? I went through a really rough time and I am quite proud that I got out of that.'

Now 42 and happily remarried to anaesthetist Neil Michael Murray, Joanne has an estimated £545 million fortune and is a mum of three.