STRICTLY star Shirley Ballas has bravely revealed her secret battle with alcohol as she tried to numb suicidal thoughts while in a dark depression.
The 64-year-old head judge feared she was following the same path as brother David, who died by suicide aged 44, when the menopause left her “anxious, depressed and desolate” in her 50s.
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However, the knowledge it would devastate her beloved mum Audrey, 86, prevented her from acting on her thoughts, instead she turned to wine.
In an extract from her new memoir, Best Foot Forward, published in the Mirror, Shirley writes: “I was anxious, depressed and desolate. I thought I was losing the plot. In my darkest hours I went to some terrible places in my head and while I hate to use the word suicidal, those thoughts crossed my mind.
“I could never have gone through with it because I wouldn’t want my mother to suffer the agony of losing a second child to suicide, but there were certainly times when I thought I’d be better off dead because the way I was living felt so hideous.”
She continued: “I’d been trying to manage the ‘situation’ myself with antidepressants, sleeping tablets, more medication to wake myself up and, I have to say this, alcohol.
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“I knew it was becoming a problem. I’d developed a dependency on that evening bottle of red and I was doing all this in private, hiding the extent of my distress from my family and those around me.”
Shirley’s dancer son Mark was the first person to realise something was wrong and together they found a doctor in California to treat her.
After a tearful consultation, Shirley was recommended bioidentical hormone replacement therapy to alter her hormones.
Oestrogen and testosterone were slowly released into her body through an implant the size of a grain of rice, and in just a few weeks Shirley felt like her old self.
Though she still suffers from anxiety, she has learned how to control it and is an advocate of meditation and counselling.
In the book, Shirley also opens up about her stalker, Kyle Shaw, 37, who was handed a 20-month prison sentence after brutally threatening the Strictly legend.
Shirley, 64, who endured years of vile messages from the brute, who even confronted her 86-year-old mother, Audrey, in a supermarket.
Reflecting on her ordeal, she said she didn’t feel safe in her own home and at one point worried he might set her house on fire.
In her book Best Foot Forward, she wrote: “I didn’t feel safe in my own home and had sleepless nights worrying about what he was going to do. Would he put a bomb through the letterbox? Or try to set the house on fire? I had smoke detectors installed everywhere.
“He’d shown he was prepared to follow a little old lady round the supermarket, what else was he capable of doing to frighten the living daylights out of my family.”
“He’s taken my peace of mind away from me and I don’t think I’ll ever fully recover it. I will never feel completely safe again.
Shaw first contacted her in 2017 because he believed her late brother was his dad due to information his mum provided.
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He accused the star of being responsible for David Rich’s death after he took his own life aged just 44.
She said how he was “hounding” her through every social media and was demanding a DNA test.
Judge Gary Woodhall said Shaw “engaged in persistent unwanted online contact”.
Sentencing him, he continued: “I’m satisfied your motivation was a desire to connect with people you believed were your family. Whether there was any truth in that belief is difficult to determine.
“However, you then embarked upon a consistent campaign of contact involving implicit threats involving not only Shirley Ballas but those connected with her.
“This was a menacing threat against her and her family and involved intrusion of her privacy which caused her real concern for her own safety.”
