Leah Charles King says her role on A Place In The Sun has been life-changing after suicidal thoughts took hold prior to her bipolar diagnosis. In a candid interview, the famously bubbly media personality revealed that behind the scenes she was secretly planning to end her life before her friend talked her down.
The Channel 4 presenter admits that her new role on the property show has transformed her life, after feeling overlooked in TV for many years. Speaking to the Express, Leah opened up about her mental health lows prior to her bipolar disorder diagnosis.
"I was so impulsive within this mania and I was just so fed up of all the pain and anguish that a mental illness like bipolar could bring that I'd had enough," she said.
Bipolar disorder can bring on manic episodes which can last for weeks or even months at a time, before changing to crippling depressive episodes. Leah admits that her depressive episodes were so bad she struggled to get out of bed or brush her teeth, and she once penned a suicide note and walked into her GP surgery.
"I couldn't take the physical pain anymore, the mental torture and so [my friend] talked me down from this eighth-storey window," Leah explained. Just two days later, she penned an urgent suicide note to her GP and took it into the surgery, feeling it was her "last chance" at life.
"If I didn't get help today, I knew what I was going to do and so I wrote this note and I plucked up the last bit of strength that I had to go into what I believed was my final battle," she revealed.
"I remember standing in this queue in tears - silent tears - and when I got to the front of the queue to reception, I just passed this note across the desk [saying] 'I'm suicidal and I need help now. If you send me home, I'm going to kill myself.' It was that blunt and obviously, it was all panic stations," Leah added.
Leah, who joined A Place In The Sun in 2021, praised the show for changing her life as she focuses on her TV career. The TV personality also started her career in music as part of the R&B pop girl band Kleshay in the 90s.
She added: "The show's been completely life-changing for me. For somebody who's been in TV for a long time and felt I was very overlooked for many years, I'd just been waiting for that break. [Before it was] like being invited to the party, but you're not allowed to sit at the table," she explained.
Leah is now an ambassador for the national mental health charity Bipolar UK, which is the only national charity dedicated to supporting people affected by bipolar.
Bipolar UK provides a range of services, including information and advice, workplace training and telephone and email peer support. For more information, visit www.bipolaruk.org
In addition, if you or someone you know has been affected by this story, Samaritans (116 123) operates a 24-hour service available every day of the year. Alternatively, you can find more information on the Samaritans website here: https://www.samaritans.org/
A Place in the Sun airs on Channel 4 every weekday from 3pm.
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