‘That was the thing; she hid it’: Caroline Flack hid Bipolar diagnosis

Caroline Flack was diagnosed as bipolar in the weeks before her death, her mother has revealed.

In the wake of Flack’s death, the presenter’s mother Christine has become an advocate for mental health awareness, and spoke about her daughter’s attempts to conceal her own struggles and how she didn’t want the last months of her life to be defined as they were.

“It’s so important to me that Carrie is not tainted by those last few months of her life. It’s tragic. I hate the memory of my daughter to be a negative one because she wasn’t negative.”

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“Carrie suffered for a long while, but never showed it because her outgoing personality covered everything,” Christine told The Sun. “Mainly she was happy, and funny, and brilliant. She just had these terrific downtimes – and not many people saw those downtimes.”

Stigmatised 

“That was the thing; she hid it. The last doctor she saw thought she may have had bipolar. And that’s what I always thought. It was just constant highs, all of a sudden, then the lows.”

She explained her daughter felt stigmatised;  that she was nervous about other people being aware of her medical history.

“She was so ashamed of people thinking she had mental health problems,” she said.

The former Love Island presenter tragically died in February 2020 just as she was due to stand trial over allegations she had assaulted her boyfriend, which she denied.

She was an avid social media user; she used the platform, and in particular, Instagram, to say that her recent bout of scrutiny had been difficult to cope with.

“This kind of scrutiny and speculation is a lot to take on for one person to take on their own.

“I’m a human being at the end of the day and I’m not going to be silenced when I have a story to tell and a life to keep going with. I’m taking some time out to get feeling better and learn some lessons from situations I’ve got myself into to.”

Fans, friends, and colleagues expressed their sadness at the shock of the untimely death of the presenter and paid tribute to her, saying she was “an absolute diamond.”

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