“Lose control of your mind, and you’ll lose everything” – GMA host Ginger Zee Opens Up about her Painful Past, moving audiences with the Power of her Story.

LITTLE ROCK (KATV) — On the 7th day of each month, we at KATV remind you to check on the new moms in your life, to raise awareness about postpartum depression.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, so we are expanding Mom Check 7 to all mental health disorders.

ABC’s chief meteorologist, Ginger Zee, sat down with KATV’s Erin Hawley in March, before travel restrictions and shut downs were put in place, to talk about her journey with depression.

“I have had depression really for as long as I can remember,” Ginger said.

Ginger, a mental health advocate, has been public about her struggle with depression.

She was in high school when she first started having what she calls “down days” that got increasingly worse.

“One day I just woke up and d1dnt w@nt t0 live anym0re. And that was the first real indication to myself and to my family that something was wrong,” Ginger recalled. “But like a lot of people do, after I survived that su:1c1d3 attempt, I went on with life like that didn’t happen and very much ignored it.”

Ginger’s career was taking off. But as the years passed, she was still struggling.

“There were more su:1c1d3 attempts and I would do the same thing,” Ginger said. “You can’t forget it. You have to pay attention to it and give it the gravity that it deserves. I tried to take my life, I shouldn’t have ever said that didn’t happen and moved on without seeking help.”

Just before Ginger started at ABC, she made the biggest decision of her life.

“I started having those feelings of I don’t want to live, and it was the first time where I had had just enough talking to others and therapy that I said, I have to do something about this. And that’s when I made the biggest change and I went and checked myself into a mental health hospital,” Ginger said. “I don’t not have depression, I don’t think it goes away. I think you just learn tools to deal with it and for me, going to the hospital and having someone assess what those tools needed to be was the key.”

Ginger spent the next few years learning how to manage her depression. So when she found out she was pregnant with her first son, she had those tools ready.

“When I got pregnant my mom was elated but then I would say in the same conversation, she was so scared,” Ginger remembered. “And because she is in medicine, she knows that depression, if you’ve had it in the past, it can come up in postpartum.”

A history of depression is a risk factor for postpartum depression. Ginger made sure her friends, family, and therapist were all checking on her.

“I was really forward-thinking with my therapist in saying I want to make sure I’m checking in and doing all these things,” Ginger said. “I really took care to check in with everybody. And everybody was aware in my life. Friends, they all said, ‘And how’s your mood?’ It wasn’t like, ‘How’s your c-section healing?’ It was, ‘How’s your brain doing and how’s your heart doing?'”

ABC’s Ginger Zee shares her journey with depression with KATV’s Erin Hawley. (KATV)

Ginger was lucky, and did not experience postpartum depression with either of her sons.

But she says postpartum depression, like any form of depression or mental illness, needs to be treated just like a broken bone would; with the right specialist, the right tools and a plan for recovery.

“I know what that feels like, only from a different instigator,” Ginger said.

And for anyone dealing with depression, Ginger has some meteorological advice:

“There will never be storms forever; it’s not how the atmosphere works. It’s not how life works,” Ginger said. “If you can just put that somewhere deep in your brain hopefully in that really bad moment you can realize that it’s going to be there and someone is going to hear you.”