Oprah Winfrey attends the 3rd annual Diane Von Furstenberg awards at the United Nations on March 9, 2012, in New York City
Media mogul and legendary multi-tasker Oprah Winfrey has confirmed rumors that she suffered from symptoms of a nervous breakdown earlier this year. In a recent interview with Access Hollywood, Winfrey explained that overseeing the struggling Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) while also filming Lee Daniels’ The Butler proved to be too much at once.
The 59-year-old said she realized she was suffering the symptoms of a nervous breakdown during an interview with Kony 2012 director Jason Russell. He’d suffered from a very public psychological breakdown last year, and as he told Winfrey about it, she said it all sounded rather familiar. She explained her own symptoms to Access Hollywood:
“In the beginning, it was just sort of speeding and a kind of numbness and going from one thing to the next thing to the next thing. I will tell you when I realized that I thought, ‘All right, if I don’t calm down I’m gonna be in serious trouble.’ I was in the middle of doing voiceovers, you know? And I remember closing my eyes in between each page because looking at the page and the words at the same time was too much stimulation for my brain.”
In another interview a few weeks later — this time with Fergie — she realized she needed to slow down, and was able to regain control.