Helen Flanagan experienced a terrifying psychotic episode earlier this year following a bad reaction to some prescribed medication for her ADHD.
It came, she told OK! in an exclusive chat, after a difficult Christmas Day without her kids - Matilda, eight, Delilah, five, and three-year-old Charlie - who were with their dad, her ex Scott Sinclair.
After returning from a New Year holiday to Bali, the former Coronation Street actress says she "felt terrible" and couldn't stop crying. “My kids weren’t with me on Christmas Day because I like to be really fair with my ex, and I know it sounds so silly because it was only one day, but it hit me really hard,” she tells us. “The plan was for me to take them to Bali for New Year instead, and although I enjoyed it, I didn’t feel myself, I was struggling.
I felt terrible when I got back, I was crying all the time, I felt so low.” In an attempt to help her manage her day-to-day life, Helen started to medicate her ADHD but had an "awful reaction" to her prescription.The effects of the medicine, on top of trying to deal with long-buried feelings about her traumatic split from her partner of 13 years, Scott Sinclair, was too much for Helen's mental health and she spiralled. “It was really sad and very scary,” she says, emotionally. “I was seeing things and I felt like I was in danger all the time, I was very scared.” While she wasn't aware of what was happening at the time - help came once her nanny alerted Helen's parents, Julia and Paul, she has since learned that she was suffering a psychotic episode.
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