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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Entertainment
Tina Campbell

Rylan Clark says he feared he had suffered a ‘stroke’ following Dan Neal divorce

Rylan has revealed he feared he had suffered a stroke as he battled with his mental health following his divorce.

The TV and radio presenter, 34, married former Big Brother contestant Dan Neal, 43, in 2015 but announced their separation in July 2021. Clark admitted in his recent memoir that their marriage was rocked by his historic cheating admissions.

He has since spoken candidly about how the breakdown of his marriage impacted him both mentally and physically.

Opening up further to Matt Willis on his On The Mend podcast, Clark explained: “My marriage ended and I didn’t know it would end and I felt like everything was my fault and I felt like, right, but this is salvageable, I can sort this out… I’m the fixer, that’s what I always do, and all of a sudden I couldn’t fix something and it’s confusing me because I was like, but that’s not right.

“I can’t remember what made me disappear, basically, from the person I knew, but the next thing I knew, I could not see, hear, eat, breathe, sleep, I couldn’t do anything.”

He noted at one point that his weight dropped to nine stone and said that he could not string a sentence together.

“It was like I’d had a stroke and my mum thought I was having a stroke,” he continued. “I just got into this dark hole where I thought I was crazy because nothing was making sense to me and partly that was because of upset and heartbreak, but at the same time, the situation, with what I was being told, I thought I was going mad, I thought I was making things up.”

He went on to add: “I’m so strong. I’m so, so strong, but I was so broken, to the point where I physically couldn’t dress, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t do none of these things.

“I tried to end it a few times, unsuccessfully, gratefully now, but I just remember going to sleep at night, after doing nothing all day, living at my mum’s, frightened to leave the house, didn’t want anyone to see me.”

Deciding to look for the silver lining in the situation, Clark said he can look back now and be grateful for what he went through, vowing: “I would never let myself get like that again.”

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