Ginger Zee: I ‘hated myself,’ checked into hospital for harrowing mental health ordeal

Ginger Zee has detailed her harrowing mental health journey in a brutally honest interview. The Good Morning America meteorologist, 42, featured on a recent episode of the Quite Frankly podcast, hosted by Frank Elaridi, where she opened up about how being diagnosed with depression at age 21 and how suffering from an eating disorder also had an impact on her mental health.

The mother-of-two began by sharing how she wrote in her book, A Little Closer to Home: How I Found the Calm After the Storm, that she would lie to herself when she was younger: “In my book, I write a lot about lying and where I learned how to lie, and that was through [my] eating disorder and I became almost expert level at it.”

Ginger continued: “I lied to men left and right… the chaos that created in my life, and the self-hate that created, through lying… The worst part, and where I was the sickest, was lying to myself. And when you can lie to yourself there is no truth for anyone else. And I had to lie to myself because I hated myself.”

In another powerful moment from the interview, Ginger shared how she became so unwell from poor mental health that checked herself into a hospital to receive treatment, shortly before she landed a dream job on GMA. “Ten days before everybody saw me take this dream job of national television, I checked myself into the Columbia psych ward,” she said.

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“At least we’re getting to a point where we can talk about it. I went to the hospital because I needed to go to the hospital. I needed help. I should’ve done it 10 years before.”

Ginger then explained further how she found the experience of receiving professional help for her depression, which she was diagnosed with at age 21, after previously opening up about her heartbreaking suicide attempt.

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“What the inpatient situation does for you, it’s not fun. It’s so scary. At first, I was looking around like, ‘I don’t need to be here.’ But they assess you and they were not going to let me leave until I was not unsafe. I really needed help. They really deemed me unsafe, that’s how bad it was.”

It’s clear that bravely detailing her own personal struggle is something the GMA star is passionate about, and with her message she hopes to change the way society discusses and thinks about mental health problems.

“If you have suicidal thoughts, that is bad and we need to look at it as such because there are ways and treatments and therapies that can make you not have those thoughts,” she added further.

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“I think that’s what I didn’t understand for a decade of my life. This is why it’s my responsibility to talk about this stuff because there’s so many people who don’t get this chance. We, as a society, need to treat [suicide] differently.”

The GMA star is married to fellow TV personality Ben Aaron, and the couple have two children, Adrian, who is seven, and Miles, who is five.