Audra McDonald broke her silence about an attempted suicide after struggling with severe depression while a student at Juilliard.
Speaking at an event for the nonprofit Hope for Depression Research Foundation, McDonald opened up about her experince.
“My biggest dream was to be on Broadway, to tell stories through song, and to live in that place where music and emotion meet. And suddenly there I was living in New York City, going to Juilliard,” McDonald said. “I had never been closer to my dream, and yet I had never been further away from it.”
McDonald also revealed that she struggled through the classical voice program.
“The voice that they were trying to shape wasn’t mine. And the path they wanted for me, it wasn’t the one that I had dreamt of,” she recalled. “That disconnect between who I was, and who I was trying to be, started to break me down.”
McDonald admitted that she was “too proud to admit that I was falling apart. I fought my whole life to get there. And now that I was there, I was lost, completely lost.”
“When you’re someone who already struggles with anxiety and depression, that kind of pressure doesn’t just make you tired. It eats at you and scrambles your thoughts,” McDonald explained. “It makes your own mind feel like an enemy. And I smiled through it. I joked through it, said I was fine. But I wasn’t fine. I was 20. And one night, I broke. I slit my wrist.”
MCDonald asked the Student Affairs director for help after the incident
“I said, ‘Please help me.’ And she did. She stayed with me and called for help. She saved my life.” McDonald would spend an entire month “heavily medicated” at Gracie Square Hospital, a psychiatric hospital on the Upper East Side.
McDonald said that asking for help is the “bravest thing” you can do.
“I’ve also learned that healing is not a straight line. It’s a daily practice. One that still continues every day. Even now, some days are clear, some days still get cloudy,” McDonald said. “But I’ve learned to keep coming back to grace, to keep loving myself. To keep giving myself permission to fail today and try again tomorrow. And there’s power and strength in that.”