Linsey Godfrey Opens Up About The Nervous Breakdown That Changed Her Life
Soap-hopper Linsey Godfrey (ex-Sarah, DAYS OF OUR LIVES; ex-Caroline, THE BOLD & THE BEAUTIFUL) has long been a mental health advocate, often taking to her social media pages to share her personal experiences with being bipolar and having Borderline Personality Disorder. The actress recently sat down with another mental health advocate from the daytime world, GENERAL HOSPITAL star Maurice Benard (Sonny), for a chat on his State of Mind YouTube series where she discussed her diagnoses, how it affected her soap opera work, and the nervous breakdown that ultimately changed her life for the better.
The 33-year-old actress revealed that she was just 21 when she was first diagnosed with Bipolar II, the less severe type of the mental illness which involves periods of depression and periods of elevated moods. But according to Godfrey, her mental health declined after she was told that her condition wasn’t bipolar after all, and she stopped taking medicine. “I spent a decade just getting worse and not understanding,” she recalled. “Watching my relationships with people change and also watching my relationship with alcohol change.”
As a result, Godfrey began drinking more and more “I was really self-medicating,” she shared. “And the more you self-medicate with a depressant, the worse it gets.”
“Work was hard,” she added, “because if I am kinda going through a depression with bipolar, and the borderline decides to add onto it, then I am just gone. I’m hopeless, and there is nothing worth living for, and I don’t understand why I am doing this. And I don’t want to be doing this. And I don’t want to talk to anybody, and I don’t want to do this scene. And I don’t want to talk to this person. And God, I don’t want to hug them… That was the hardest thing. And not knowing why for a really long time.”
Godfrey tried to handle her issues on her own but ultimately sought out treatment a year and a half ago. “The best thing that could have ever happened to me was having a nervous breakdown at the end of 2019,” she admitted. “Finally being like, I cannot control my emotions, I don’t feel like myself, I didn’t know who I was anymore. I broke down, I was having anxiety attacks all the time, I was hurting myself, I was drinking really bad.”
Since seeking treatment, Godfrey not only found the right combination of medication to control her conditions but she’s also been completely sober! “I can’t [drink] on one of my medicines. But I quit because I wanted to give myself a chance to get my medicines introduced to myself without anything else in my system,” she explained. “And then I got protective of my health. I started to feel in control of my mental health and my emotions and I just got really scared and really protective about adding else in. So now it’s been like a year and a half, and I don’t miss it. Occasionally I miss the routine of it. I miss sitting and having a glass of wine. And I like being able to remember the night!”
You can watch Godfrey’s full interview with Benard below, where she also discusses being a single mom, a cancer survivor, recovering from a horrific car accident, and her work with refugee children as an ambassador for INARA.
