Jessica Wright suffered post-traumatic stress after car crash

14 May 2019

Jessica Wright suffered with post-traumatic stress after she was involved in a high-speed car crash.

Jessica Wright

The former 'The Only Way is Essex' star believes her anxiety disorder was triggered 13 years ago after she experienced a near-death situation when she was thrown across a motorway at 70mph.

Speaking as part of Heat magazine's Where's your head at? campaign, the 33-year-old beauty said: "My car flew across three lanes of motorway. I was going at 70mph. The tyre burst and all the traffic was coming towards me. So at that moment I shouted out 'I don't want to die' because I thought that's it. I personally think that might have triggered it, but at the same time I think that mental health [problems] can also be caused when your serotonin isn't full.

"You might need something to up the serotonin levels in your brain. So I don't know if it's a combination or if it's something that was triggered from the post-traumatic stress.

"It was about six months after my car crash I had a panic attack. I didn't know what was happening to me and I was working at the time and the ambulance were called, and they came in and said, 'you're suffering a really bad panic attack.'

"And from then on I kind of had them every now and again and they were horrific. They scared me so much, because you can't breathe. It was only when I was about four or five years in to them that I told myself, 'you're not going to die from a panic attack, and you just have to ride it out.' "

The 'Celebrity Dinner Date' star thinks her battle with worrying thoughts really kicked in when she was "about 26" but she was too scared to tell her family - including her brother Mark Wright - what she was dealing with inside her head because she didn't think they'd "understand" her.

She explained: "Anxiety hit when I was about 26, I didn't know what was happening to me but I had these horrible thoughts. I felt like the world was detached from me, I felt like my family didn't understand me and I couldn't say how I felt, it was all just trapped inside."