Mandisa reveals how deep depression nearly led her to suicide
"If I had not gotten off that road I would not be sitting here today," she said.
— -- Grammy Award-winning singer Mandisa revealed that she fell into such a deep depression three years ago after her dear friend Kisha lost her battle with breast cancer that she almost took her own life.
“It got pretty bad -- to the point where if I had not gotten off that road I would not be sitting here today,” Mandisa said on “Good Morning America.” "I was this close to listening to that voice that told me, ‘You can be with Jesus right now, Mandisa. All you have to do is take your life.’
“It almost happened,” she continued. “But God is what I say. He saved my life quite literally.”
Mandisa said her friend’s death “shook the foundation underneath me in a way that I didn’t expect.”
“I’ve never been the type of person that shakes my fist and yells at God,” she added. “I’m the kind of person that shuts down.”
Emotional eating and isolation became her norm, and she said she hid away in her home and shut herself off from the world.
“[Emotional eating] is what I have done my entire life,” she explained. “After losing 120 pounds, which I talked about my first time here, I gained it all back and 75 more. I sunk into the deepest depression of my life after Kisha passed.”
It wasn’t until her friends surprised her at a movie theater and held an intervention that she finally sought the help she needed.
“I came out of the movie theater, this was after years of me being in that dark place and ignoring everybody, and I noticed that my car had a bunch of sticky notes all over it,” she recalled. “As I got closer to it I realized that those notes said things like, ‘We love you. Come back to us. We miss you.’ And then as I got closer to my car, a group of my friends, who I had shut out, they were there.
“And they had been waiting at that movie theater as I sat there and watched two movies, not just one, they waited there for over four hours for me. And they pretty much had an intervention and they said, ‘We love you just as you are but we love you too much to leave you that way.’”
She now has a new album, “Out of the Dark," about overcoming that horribly dark period.
“As I started to share this story I started to hear from people who said, ‘I'm just so glad to know I’m not alone. And that I’m not the only one who felt that way.’ The album that is coming out May 19 is called ‘Out of the Dark’ because that is where God has lifted me out of.
“I realized I don’t have to be perfect and have it all together,” she said. “I am a masterpiece in the making, I’m just unfinished for right now.”
"Out of the Dark" is available on May 19.