Kellie Pickler Talks About Her Battle with Depression

It’s been nearly a week since the last celebrity decided to break their silence on the hasn’t-been-taboo-in-twenty-years subject of depression.

So it’s about time another one stepped up to the plate!

Enter Kellie Pickler, who has a new album to sell wants to help others by sharing her own story.

“Everything in my professional life seemed great,” says the former American Idol contestant, 22. “But in my personal life, I was just crumbling.”

Anti-depressants made her “crazy,” she says, and the side effects forced her to quit the pills.

At the same time, she watched her father – a convicted felon who had been released from prison soon after her Idol stint – spiral downward again and return to jail, while her mother, who abandoned her at age 2, unexpectedly reemerged.

“I was an emotional wreck,” she says.

Her friendships with singers Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood, along with a new love – Nashville songwriter Kyle Jacobs – and writing songs for her new album (her self-titled sophomore effort was released Sept. 30) helped her find balance again.

“He makes me feel so good about being me,” she says of Jacobs.

Can I just say something?

(Of course I can, it’s my blog. But asking first is stylistically effective, don’t you think?)

If I am ever a really famous person, I have like a laundry list of shit I’m going to pull out for these sob-story articles. Seriously name the mental disorder, and I’ve been diagnosed with it by some over-zealous psychologist at some point in my whiny, whiny life. I was applying for new health insurance yesterday, and they have like a 14-page questionnaire filled with diseases and you have to check a box if you’ve been diagnosed with any of them. And on 13 of the 14 pages, I checked nothing. I don’t have fibromyalgia. Never had encephalitis. No endometriosis poking past this uterus. I am a perfect candidate for health insurance. And then we get to the “mental health” page and I’m like, “Oh, shit, here we go,” and I had to check like everything short of “mental retardation,” which, at that point, I kind of thought I should go get checked out for just to be safe. I think I need to just stop going to see shrinks and just accept the fact that I get grumpy sometimes.

But anyway, here’s the point: when I decide to over-share to a major national publication, I’m totally gonna preface it with, “Look, I wouldn’t normally be saying cornball shit like this, but I have a new book out, and I figure this’ll be an effective way to insert myself directly in the spotlight.” At least be honest about it, ya know?