‘GMA’s Ginger Zee Reveals Crippling Battle With Depression That Once Left Her Suicidal

Good Morning America‘s chief meteorologist Ginger Zee has opened up about her debilitating battle with depression, discussing her struggle in her new book, Natural Disaster: I Cover Them. I Am One, out now.

Zee told People that when she was 21, she locked herself in the bathroom and took every pill in her medicine cabinet. Her then-roommate and ex-boyfriend realized what had happened and took her to the hospital, and while she had taken mostly Benadryl and other benign substances and recovered, she was diagnosed with depression.

Zee explained that she’d “lost all hope.”

“I just shut down,” she said. “It wasn’t worth living. I was wasting people’s time and space.”

“In that moment, my brain, and probably a chemical somewhere within me, said, ‘You need to kill yourself,’” she added. “The only voices I could hear were telling me, ‘You are not worth it.’”

In her book, the 36-year-old revealed that she checked herself into a mental hospital to seek treatment just weeks before starting her job with ABC News in 2011.

“My career was always going up. I was so lucky and fortunate in times where I had made bad choices that my career was still on the upswing,” she explained. “At home, my personal life was regularly falling apart and from childhood on, I had a lot of chaos and I was addicted to chaos, I was addicted to self-harm, and I had to seek help at the hospital.”

The meteorologist is now married to husband, Ben Aaron, and the pair shares a son, Adrian, and is currently expecting their second child.

“I’ve been lucky to find a husband who doesn’t judge my past,” Zee told People of Aaron. “In fact, writing this book, he wanted more, which says a lot. He’s like, ‘I want to listen. I want to be a part of that.’”

The soon-to-be mom of two added that she hopes sharing her story will help others who might be feeling the same way she once did.

“I had a disease, I will always have that disease. It’s not something that just magically goes away,” she wrote in the book. “But I sought help and I actually committed to getting help. Just like anybody with cancer, or any other disease, they go to the hospital and that’s ok. And you’re allowed to do that. We should all be allowed to be who we are, even though that happens to be the disease we fight.”

Photo Credit: ABC