Frankie Sandford’s fight with depression

Six months ago Frankie Sandford was hospitalised with a mystery illness.

Now the 23-year-old has finally come clean about her struggle with depression in a brave interview with Glamour magazine.

Speaking for the first time about her illness, she said: “One night, I got upset because Wayne hadn’t bought the right yoghurts. I managed to convince myself he didn’t know me at all.

“It set off this spiral of negative thinking – that if I disappeared, it wouldn’t matter to anyone. In fact, it would make everybody’s life easier. I felt that I was worthless, that I was ugly, that I didn’t deserve anything.”

Frankie revealed that it started with a few silly arguments with her boyfriend, footballer Wayne Bridge, but turned into a serious fight with her own self-confidence.

Now on the road to recovery, she says she’s realised that “no one is 100% happy all the time”.

She added: “Every time I spoke to someone, I’d be thinking, ‘They probably think I’m a horrible person. Am I boring them? Do I look ugly?'”

Her doctor suggested a quiet break in the Cotswolds with Wayne and her two dogs, but it didn’t help. Frankie admits she “became hysterical” and suffered a panic attack before realising she needed proper treatment.

She told the mag: “I was so nervous, because I was ‘Frankie from The Saturdays’. I didn’t know if people would be horrible to me and say: ‘You’re in a successful girl band, you’ve got this great boyfriend, he’s got loads of money.’ But nobody judged me. Nobody thought I was weird.”

The singer spent a month in hospital but returned to the stage with her bandmates Una Healy, Vanessa White, Mollie King and Rochelle Wiseman in December. She’s now working with mental wellness charity Mind, to help others with similar struggles.

She said: “I did lose myself, but I feel like me again now.”