Corrie legend has terrifying backstage panic attack - minutes before appearing live on Loose Women
Coronation Street's Simon Gregson has opened up about his 20-year anxiety battle on Loose Women - and how he almost didn't go on the show after suffering a panic attack shortly beforehand. The soap star stopped by Thursday 2 January's show to raise awareness of mental health, revealing that he nearly pulled out of the appearance.
"It all came to a head in 2015, I kept having anxiety attacks, panic attacks," he told the Loose Women panel. "Which is so bizarre because I've been having them all day today. I was like, 'there's no way I can go on.'
"It just hits you like a tonne of bricks and makes you completely incapacitated. I've been having them since 1990 but I just got on with it."
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Simon decided to address his regular panic attacks after noticing that his kids were suffering with the same issue. "When I had children and they were noticing it and they were getting anxious, I thought, 'I've passed it on. It's like a cold - I've given it to them.'"
The actor, who is best known for playing Weatherfield icon Steve McDonald, previously spoke about his struggle with panic attacks - admitting that at one point, he was suffering up to 12 panic attacks per day. The 50-year-old revealed how producers on the ITV soap called in a doctor to come to the set to help him as his condition came to a head. He also spoke about how he had to visit a psychiatrist because his mental health was causing him to believe he was suffering from mystery illnesses.
Speaking about his character Steve’s issues with depression, Simon said he struggled to act out panic attacks - despite having '10, 11, 12 a day' himself. But he told how he had overcome his own anxiety issues after he took six months off from the show and retrained his brain not to worry about trivial things.
Speaking on ITV's Lorraine about his mental health problems, he said: “In 2015 it came to its head and I didn't know what it was. I had heart scans and brain scans, they thought I had vertigo then we went back to the beginning and my GP figured out that I had an anxiety disorder. I'd get numb fingers, tunnel vision, feel sick, dizzy. Completely deliberating.”
Loose Women's Thursday episode saw Sunetra Sarker take the helm as the ITV show's host, while Linda Robson, Dame Kelly Holmes and Kéllé Bryan joined the panel.
