SINEAD O’Connor reckons using social media during her mental health crisis saved her life.

The singer, now known by her Muslim name Shuhada Sadaqat, endured a well-publicised battle with illness in recent years, often posting emotional updates about her condition online.

3 Sinead O'Connor believes social media saved her life during her mental health crisis Credit: David Bebber - The Times

3 O'Connor, pictured here in 2017, endured a well-publicised battle with illness in recent years, often posting emotional updates about her condition online Credit: Sinead O'Connor : Facebook

3 The singer has spoken about her struggle with mental health in an in-depth interview with Dave Fanning on RTE 2FM

In one distressing incident, she released a video in which she said she was living in a New Jersey motel and had no one to support her other than her psychiatrist.

The 52-year-old said she believes the video was a case of her “screaming to save my life”.

In an in-depth interview with Dave Fanning on RTE 2FM, she revealed: “It actually saved my life. When you are suicidal but you don’t want to die, you’d do anything to save your life.

“When you’re so isolated, perhaps through your own fault and you’ve burnt all your bridges because you have been unwell.

“You’re very isolated and also terribly close to suicide, you don’t know what you would do, nobody knows what they would do, to save your life.

“In my case I was terribly lonely, it’s a symptom of loneliness, who else was there to talk to? I didn’t read replies, good or bad,

“I needed to get sh*t out. When you’re drowning you’ll do anything, you’ll grab anything, and you’ll scream, and that was me metaphorically screaming to save my life.”

The iconic musician has spent much of the last three and a half years away from the spotlight but is now back to good health and preparing for a return to the stage.

Ahead of two planned gigs in Dublin and Cork later this year, she told Fanning how she’s keen to perform again and write new songs based on her recovery from her recent trauma.

'BURNING BRIDGES'

In the last few years, Sinead has received treatment in a variety of facilities in Ireland and abroad.

And she said she has finally reached a point where she understands her condition following years of incorrect diagnoses.

She explained: “When you aren’t well and you don’t realise you’re not well you end up burning your bridges a bit so you end up a bit isolated.

“With every illness there is a scale from 0 to 100 and they’ve managed to mathematically work out my situation.

“I have three mental health conditions. One is borderline personality disorder, that they say is 50 per cent of what’s wrong with me.

“That’s an illness you can only get from trauma, it is curable, therefore.

“It is co diagnosed with another condition which is called complex post-traumatic stress disorder and I’m 40 per cent suffering from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, and ten per cent bipolar.

“So let’s just be clear that that’s what going on because I guess mental health is too loose a label.”

She added: “If shit is going on in your life that’s too much you can get suicidal.

“I’m generally okay as long as somebody isn’t treating me like shit, frankly. Then depending on who the person is, things can get triggered or not triggered.

“So you’d have to keep running back to hospital if you didn’t learn to manage those kind of feelings.

“I know it’s a lie, the suicidal feeling, it’s not true. I don’t want to die at all.”

“I sometimes want the shit that’s going on to stop. What I’ve learned over the last three and a half years is that you learn to tolerate those feelings without becoming so distressed that you have to either act on them or go to hospital.”

Thankfully, the Nothing Compares 2 U singer has come out the other end of her struggles, and is now “really, really good”.

'A SOLDIER'

She has also found peace thanks to her introduction to Islam, and believes that despite her upbringing, she has “been a Muslim all my life and didn’t even know it.”

Highlighting her determination to defend the religion, she said: “Because I have to fight stigma every day in my own life I identified hugely with the stigma that the Muslims have had to deal with so in some ways I’m a bit of a mercenary as well. I see myself as a soldier.”

However, she insisted that religion isn’t the only reason she’s now in a good place, explaining: “It’s not just because I found a home religiously speaking, but because I did the bloody hard grafting it takes to get well and get better and because I had the support of St Pats who are incredible and put up with all my shite and looked after me.

“And because I had the support of certain good friends.”

She added: “Now that I’m out of all that, the family has healed hugely. I now have great relationships with my father, my sister and my brothers so everything is healing.

“The circumstances which were making me unwell no longer exist.”

The Grammy award-winning star also told how she has spent time dealing with the trauma of her upbringing, including her time in a Magdalene Laundry, where she was sent at the age of 14.

Sinead has claimed that as a child she endured years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse at the hands of her mother before being handed over to the nuns.

Her experiences there helped fuel her hatred of the Catholic Church, and she provoked public uproar in 1992 when she tore up a photograph of the Pope during an appearance on Saturday Night Live.

Yet, before she became so disillusioned with the Church, she said she had harboured dreams of becoming a priest.

Sinead, who once styled herself as Mother Bernadette, said: “Growing up, when I was a kid we all used to pretend to say masses, we weren’t pretending to be singers.

“I have a huge interest in working in palliative care as a companion. The only people who got to work with dying people were priests and there was no point in me doing that because I was a woman.

“If they had allowed priests I would’ve been in there at 14, with my singing voice. I would have brought that to them.”

Despite her hatred of Catholic institutions, she said she wanted to clarify that she hadn’t suffered abuse in the Magdalene Laundries.

In fact, she credits a kind-hearted nun there with guiding her towards a career in music.

'THE MAKING OF ME'

She explained: “For me, in the years that I got there, there wasn’t abuse, there was some very dodgy punishments, i.e. you’d be made to sleep in the hospice with the dying old ladies.

“That’s about the worst thing that ever happened there for me. In fact the nun that ran that place Sr Margaret bought me my first guitar, if not for her and that place I wouldn’t have been a musician. She could see that I was so delinquent that there was nothing anyone could do with me and I was only interested in music.”

“It wasn’t nice being there, it was very sad. There was a lot of sad kids. It was sad being delinquent and knowing that your family can’t even manage you, but at the same time it was the makings of me.

“There was no abuse. I saw other people be abused. One of my friends had her baby torn out of her arms by the nuns, not by Sr Margaret, but a bunch of nuns came in and stole my friend’s baby.

“That’s the most horrific thing that I saw there.”

Since shooting to fame in the late 1980s with her debut album The Lion and the Cobra, Sinead has enjoyed massive success.

She became a globally recognised name in 1990 with a cover of Prince’s song Nothing Compares 2U and has gone on to score several commercial hits as well as dueting with everyone from U2 and Peter Gabriel to Massive Attack.

Yet despite her fondness for collaborations, she once turned down Ronan Keating – because she hates his singing accent.

In fact, it’s the only time she ever refused a collaboration request, leaving the Boyzone “upset”.

Explaining her reasons for the snub, she said: “It’s because the way that I was trained as a singer is called bel canto, where your emotions take you to the notes.

“One of the number one rules in bel canto is that you always sing in your own accent. The muscles of your voice are formed by the time you’re 14, of your accent.

“The singers that get trouble with their voices are people who are people who are putting on a false accent. I was trained for years by Frank Merriman not to constrict myself or constrict my voice."

“There was a certain person that I couldn’t breathe when I heard him singing because he constricted his voice into an American accent so much and it was Ronan Keating."

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She continued: “He asked me would I do a record with him and I said: “yeah, when you start singing in your own accent”, which I think really, really, really upset him which is not what I meant to do.

“I guess I meant to say: “look, I’d sing with you, I would, but I can’t breathe when I hear you doing that to your voice.”

She added: “I didn’t mean to upset poor Ronan as much as I did, I was hoping we could make a record together but I have a physical response, I literally cannot take a breath when I hear somebody singing that way, because your body’s your instrument.”

IF you are having suicidal thoughts, suffering from anxiety or depression or just want to talk, call The Samaritans on 116 123.