Majella O’Donnell: It's time talk about mental health openly

Majella O’Donnell is not afraid to speak out about her health challenges.  After sharing her breast cancer journey in 2013, she is now opening up about her in-hospital treatment for depression, reflecting on a recent ADHD diagnosis and offering mental health advice to her Instagram followers

Majella O'Donnell: It doesn’t bother me that people know that I suffer from depression, because I also [have] great mental health too

Majella O'Donnell is a self-described “open book”. Her experience with mental health issues has been well documented, in large part due to her willingness to speak about it.

Her first recollection of feeling “depressed”, although she didn’t know that is what it was at the time, was when she was 19 and her boyfriend of a couple of years had broken up with her.

“It just floored me”, she recalls. At the time, she thought it was normal and that everyone felt like that when a relationship broke down. “But that feeling persisted for about a year — I was completely devastated and spent days in bed.”

Eventually, though, O’Donnell began to feel better and says she didn’t experience another depressive episode until years later when her first marriage broke down. She says that she was terrified of being on her own, particularly with two young children.

“I didn’t think I could do it on my own. But I got through it. It was very difficult, but that was when I started to learn more about why I would get down or feel low.”

It was at this time that O’Donnell was first diagnosed with “severe depression” and her GP prescribed anti-depressants. She also started counselling and read books to try to understand how her brain worked and why life experiences affected her a certain way. On medication and with a better insight into the inner workings of her mind, she began to feel better.

“And then I met Daniel, and we got married, and everything was fantastic,” O’Donnell says.

Majella with her husband, singer Daniel O'Donnell

But an out-of-the-blue experience two years after her 2002 wedding to the high-profile country singer followed. “One evening we were touring in London, and we were in a hotel room, and I can remember going to the bathroom at 3 o’clock in the morning and just rocking. I thought, oh my god, I’m going down this dark hole again.”

This time, though, O’Donnell says there was no clear reason for how she was feeling: “I was really happy. I didn’t have any worries, and suddenly I’m going down this big black hole again, and it really rocked me.”

On reflection, O’Donnell puts the incident down to her having come off her anti-depressant medication. After she married Daniel, she says everything seemed to settle down and she was happy and content.

“Naively, I thought I didn’t need the medication anymore, so I weaned myself off it,” she explains. “I would say I was fully off it about four weeks when that happened to me in London.”

After chatting with Daniel, who she says is incredibly supportive, she knew she needed to go back on the medication. “I was 43 at that stage, and I knew that occasionally I would feel down or be really low. It would usually last for about a week or so, and then I’d start to come out of it again. And it was that way for years including through my breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. But then in 2024 I went down, and I couldn’t get back up.”

At that point, O’Donnell says she knew she’d reached the limit of what she could do herself and how much the medication could help her. She needed more help. During a visit with her GP, he asked her if she would consider residential care in a psychiatric hospital. “I said I would. I would do anything to feel better.”

She entered St John of God University Hospital in Stillorgan, Dublin, where she stayed for 10 weeks. Following a structured programme, which involved therapy, art therapy, relaxation techniques, and breathing exercises, she acquired tools and insights that she still uses to this day to manage her mental health, or as she prefers to call it, “mind health”.

Coping tools

Today, it’s these coping tools and tips, and living with depression for over 40 years, that O’Donnell is pouring into a new series of video blogs on Instagram.

In mid-June, she took to the social media platform and started releasing short videos where she chats about mental health, specifically depression and anxiety, linking it back to her journey and real-world advice.

“There’s nothing like that available to people right now, and people need stuff that they can access in their own homes, from someone they consider a trusted voice,” she says. “My hope is that people can just go in, click on the video and get something from it.”

She also sees the videos, which are self-recorded, as a way of de-stigmatising mental health struggles. By speaking so openly about her life, she hopes it can help people to recognise their experiences and know they’re not alone.

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When O’Donnell posted the first video, she disabled comments as a pre-emptive move to protect herself. She says that even if she had 200 positive comments and one negative, that negative comment would stay with her.

But two weeks in, after her Instagram followers jumped from 2,000 to 27,000, O’Donnell says she re-evaluated. “It felt like I was talking into the wilderness. Without comments, I realised I didn’t know if the videos were helping people. But then, when I noticed the followers going up, I thought there must be something good happening here.”

She turned comments on, but only comments from her followers and those she’s following. Suddenly, she could see exactly how her videos were impacting people.

“People were saying, ‘Thank you for turning on comments, now I can tell you how much you’re helping me’. And I tell you, it’s given me a real purpose, because I feel like I’m really helping others. A 10-minute video every two or three days is actually touching somebody, and that’s just fantastic.”

Understanding triggers

Although there are still times when she “gets down” or “feels low”, she is now better able to manage these times, and indeed, better able to see them coming.

O’Donnell knows that if she doesn’t get enough sleep at night, it can affect her mental health. Having too much on can also be an issue, as it can cause her to become stressed. But understanding the triggers has been a game-changer: “I now know there are things that can get on top of me and bring me down, so I need to manage those.”

Following a diagnosis of ADHD two years ago, O’Donnell says that how she dealt with and reacted to certain things has begun to make more sense.

“As someone with ADHD, I am very enthusiastic about new projects, and I want to do loads of things. I can get really hyper-focused on things and spend hours on them, and that’s a good thing, of course; it meant I wrote my book, It’s All in the Head, in about four weeks. But I just need to be aware of that trait and know that if I take on too much, I can get too tired or stressed, and that can have a knock-on effect on how I feel.”

She sees maintaining her mental health as a lifelong journey, and has made adjustments to her life to help her better manage it. Medication is an ongoing support, and learning from her experience, she knows it’s something she’ll continue to take for the rest of her life. She’s also learned how to manage becoming over-stimulated and regularly takes time out.

“Sometimes when I go out with too many people, it can be overstimulating for me. I need the quiet, I need to pull back when that happens.”

Her day to day management is not one single technique, but small, repeatable habits: Sleep and stress boundaries, medication, breathing and music, gratitude, gentle movement, realistic eating, and permitting herself to step back when she’s overloaded.

O’Donnell loves nothing better than pottering around her garden. She also loves to paint, something she picked up from her time in St John of God. But her go-to strategy for when things become too much is deep breathing.

“I go into my bedroom, turn down the lights, lie down, and I take deep breaths,” she says. “I might put on some meditative music, that really helps me.”

When it comes to exercise, she’s very honest: “I know exercise is good for your mental health. But I am useless at it. I hear all the advice that says exercise, exercise, exercise, but I think we need to remind ourselves that that doesn’t have to mean being a gym bunny. It could be going out for a walk, and I do try to do that, but sometimes I don’t even do that.”

It’s this honesty that’s so refreshing about O’Donnell, and arguably why her videos are resonating with people.

“It doesn’t bother me that people know that I suffer from depression, because I also [have] great mental health too. It doesn’t bother me because it’s something that just happened; this is the way I am.”