Gisele Bundchen gets candid about mental health battle during modeling career: 'I felt suffocated'
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Gisele Bundchen has opened up about her mental health battles she faced at the peak of her modeling career.
In September 24 episode of 'CBS News Sunday Morning', the 43-year-old supermodel shares that she experienced panic attacks at a point in her life due to her stressful work demands.
“You know, I was in tunnels,” she told journalist Lee Cowan. “I couldn’t breathe. And then I started being in studios, and I felt, like, suffocated.”
Gisele Bundchen considered taking her own life
Bundchen recalled staying on the ninth floor of a building at the time and having to take the stairs out of fear that she would get stuck in the elevator.
She said, “I’d be hyperventilating. … You know when you can’t breathe even when the windows are open, you feel like, I don’t want to live like this, you know what I mean?”
Cowan then asked if the former wife of Tom Brady really thought “about jumping.” The Brazilian model responded, "Yeah. For, like, a second.”
Gisele Bundchen previously spoke about her dark period
Bundchen first disclosed her suicide ideations in 2018 before the release of her memoir, 'Lessons: My Path to a Meaningful Life'.
“I actually had the feeling of, ‘If I just jump off my roof, this is going to end, and I never have to worry about this feeling of my world closing in,’” she told People at the time, while promoting her book.
Bundchen also penned the event in her memoir, noting that she once felt like “everything in [her] life was going to kill [her].”
“The idea swept over me then: Maybe it will be easier if I just jump. It will be all over,” she wrote. “I can get out of this.”
The super model added, “When I think back on that moment, and that 23-year-old girl, I want to cry. I want to tell her that everything will be all right, that she hasn’t even begun to live her life. But in that moment, the only answer seemed to be to jump.”
Gisele Bundchen says she is 'in a different place' in life now
Bundchen told 'CBS News Sunday Morning' that she is “in a different place” in her life now.
“I’m able to choose more of what I want,” the author says from her home in Costa Rica. “I think before I was more surviving, and now I’m living, which is different.”
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She was once the highest-paid model in the industry when she earned around $17.5 million in a single year but quit the industry in 2015.
Bundchen teased earlier this year when asked about a return to the runway, saying, “Never say never.”
The supermodel is still in high demand as she has partnership ties with brands like Victoria’s Secret, Iconic and Louis Vuitton.
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