Actress, writer and producer Sharon Horgan has spoken about how being apart from her family affected her mental health.
Horgan, who lives in London, said that she found it incredibly difficult being separated from her then-husband and their two children for five months while filming her acclaimed comedy series Divorce in New York.
"I lost my mind completely and I got OCD from it. I developed anxiety," the co-creator of Catastrophe recalled on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs.
“I would lie in bed at night and I would feel my heart going and I would think: 'Oh, I am about to have a heart attack'. It was only afterwards that I realised it was anxiety.”
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
She continued: "I didn't not see my kids for five months. Every couple of weeks I would go back or they would come over. But it was still ridiculously long and painful."
Horgan also spoke about the ways in which her approach to parenting has changed since she and her husband of 14 years, businessman Jeremy Rainbird, divorced in 2019.
“I was fun mum for years. I entirely thought that was my role but that changes when you co-parent," she explained. "Everything changes and you take on a lot more roles and I am much more practical than I was, and I think that is a positive thing."
Horgan then added candidly: "It had some dips in the middle where I thought, 'Oh, that thing I thought I was, which was a good mother, I am not entirely sure about. When you bring anything like that into your kid's life it's tricky, when you turn the roles upside down, but it balances out and everything eased back.”