"We think and we feel that we should just be able to handle it on our own," said the actress. "I've always been strong enough to get through every single difficult situation in my life. I grew up in an addictive household. My mother [Teri] had acute alcoholism. It's in my blood. I was never going to be the one to succumb to it."

Shields has two girls, Rowan, 6, and Grier, 3 years old. She gave birth to daughter Rowan in 2003 after a miscarriage and seven IVF attempts. "I finally had a healthy beautiful baby girl and I couldn't look at her," the TV writer Chris Henchy's wife said of her feeling that day. "I couldn't hold her and I couldn't sing to her and I couldn't smile at her ... All I wanted to do was disappear and die."

This condition also make her believed, "I should not exist. The baby would be better off without me. Life was never going to get better – so I better just go."

Shields was prescribed medication, though she stopping taking it one point, thinking she didn't need them. She told the crowd that it was the week when she almost did not resist driving her car straight into a wall on the side of the freeway. "My baby was in the back seat and that even pissed me off because I thought she's even ruining this for me. I just wanted to drive into the wall and my friend stayed on the phone with me and made me safely get home."

She later called her doctor to ask for more help. Eventually, she was diagnosed with a chemical imbalance. "I learned what was going on inside my body and what was going on inside my brain," Brooke said. "I learned I wasn't doing anything wrong to feel that way. That it was actually out of my control."

"If I had been diagnosed with any other disease, I would have run to get help. I would have worn it like a badge ... I didn't at first – but finally I did fight. I survived," she added.


Brooke Shields Recalls Suicidal Thoughts After Giving Birth