Ellie Goulding shares regret about grandfather's suicide in moving mental health post
Ellie Goulding has spoken about living with mental health issues in a candid Instagram post.
Addressing her 14.4 million followers on the platform, the 32-year-old singer said she sometimes battles “exhilaration, madness, absolutely nothing at all, confusion, chronic sadness” in the space of a few days.
The post, shared in the wake of World Mental Health Day, which fell on Thursday last week, Goulding revealed her regret surrounding her grandfather’s suicide, which happened “a few years ago”.
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“I wish I had spoken to him more, and wish we could have had even the smallest clue of how unhappy he was,” she wrote.
In the caption, which accompanies a picture of her moving through the air on a rope swing, Goulding said she uses exercise to help maintain her mental health.
“I keep my head straight by training every day (running and boxing mainly),” she said.
This is the first time Goulding has spoken publicly about her grandfather’s suicide. Sadly, in the UK, male suicide figures remain high with men; it is the biggest killer of men under the age of 45.
What’s more, men account for three-quarters of all suicides. In 2018, there were 6,507 suicides registered in the UK, with 4,903 of them being among men.
The singer has spoken candidly about her own mental health struggles in the past. In 2013, for a cover interview with Cosmopolitan UK, Goulding spoke about her first panic attack, which she had experienced on the way to a funeral.
“I called a friend to take me to hospital, where they told me it was just a panic attack. From that day, I kept having them,” Goulding told the publication.
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Later, in 2017, in a moving personal essay for Well + Good, she confessed to experiencing anxiety and panic attacks as she became more successful in her music career.
"I think part of what sparked my panic attacks was not feeling confident enough to believe in myself – I was scared I wasn't as good of a singer as everyone thought I was,” she wrote.
