Peter Andre has admitted to feeling like he ‘couldn’t talk to anyone’ after suffering a mental breakdown during the height of his career.
The British-Australian singer and TV personality, 51, broke out in the mid-1990s thanks to chart-topping hits like Mysterious Girl, Flava, and I Feel You.
After dropping off the charts around the turn of the millennium, Peter returned to the limelight after appearing on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here in 2004.
But before his return, he’s now revealed that he suffered a breakdown in the late 90s that, he now realises, lasted all the way through to the 2010s.
On top of that, he’s also confessed to feeling completely alone after going to doctors and professionals who didn’t seem to know how to help him.
Writing in OK Magazine, he said: ‘I remember having my first breakdown in the 90s and the years that followed were horrific. I felt like I couldn’t talk to anyone because it was taboo.
‘Back then, you’d go to a doctor and sometimes they wouldn’t know what to do,’ the dad-of-five revealed in the highly personal column on Monday.
Writing in another column for New Magazine, he admitted to suffering from the breakdown for long after it initially came on: ‘My breakdown lasted a long time. It was only when I got to my 40s that I truly started to come through it.’
He continued: ‘I think I was lost – I was getting better, then my brother Andrew passed away and that triggered a lot of things – but the best thing is, there’s a lot of help out there now.’
The Insania hitmaker – who has Junior, 18, and Princess, 16, with first wife Katie Price and Amelia, 10, Theo, six, and six-month-old Arabella with wife Emily – wants to make sure his children don’t suffer in silence.
‘I always encourage all my kids to be open about how they feel. All the time I’ll say, ‘Do you want to sit and talk about anything?’ I never want my kids to experience [what I went through].’
Between 1998 and 2004, Peter went through a six-year break from the music and TV industries, having been involved in talent shows and the pop world from the late 1980s.
He initially rose to fame in 1989 after appearing on the Australian talent show New Faces, where he secured a recording contract worth more than £100,000.
In the early 1990s, he was sent to the UK to work with British music producers in an attempt to launch himself internationally – between 1995 and 1998, he scored two number ones, five more top 10 hits, and a UK number one album.
After they both competed on I’m A Celebrity, Peter met Katie and the two began dating, eventually marrying in 2005 and having two children together.
They divorced in 2009, with Peter meeting current wife Emily MacDonagh in 2012, with the couple going on to have three children together – they’ve been married since 2015.
Peter has previously opened up about his struggles with anxiety, revealing that he was even hospitalised for a stretch when he struggled to deal with panic attacks.
Speaking back in 2020, he said: ‘When you talk to people now, and you talk about anxiety, and you talk about breakdowns, some people look at it like a weakness. Some people look at it like a taboo – but the truth is, it’s so real.
‘So many people are going through it. I went through it for years. It was a moment, it was in 1998.’