Ed Sheeran has admitted there was a time recently where he no longer wanted to live, having gone through huge levels of trauma before eventually finding help with therapy.
In the trailer for his new Disney+ documentary Ed Sheeran: The Sum Of It All, Sheeran speaks about what he had to overcome in 2022.
Sheeran, 32, opened up about juggling his life as one of the world’s biggest popstars with being a family man, having welcomed Lyra, his first child with wife Cherry Seaborn back in 2020 – before their brood grew last year with second daughter Jupiter, now eight months old.
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But among all the happiness, there has also been plenty of heartache.
This includes being struck by grief when his best friend Jamal Edwards suddenly died of a cardiac arrhythmia, which had been brought on by cocaine use, last year.
Sheeran believes he owes Edwards his career, thanks to appearances on his influential YouTube channel SBTV, and also crashed at his house when he found himself in London with no place to live at 18.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, to tie in with the forthcoming four-part documentary, he recalled how he had been out for dinner with Taylor Swift and her boyfriend Joe Alwyn, exchanging texts with Edwards about plans to shoot a video the following day.
“Twelve hours later, he was dead,” he said.
Tearing up, Sheeran continued: “My best friend died.
“And he shouldn’t have done.”
Sheeran explained how Edwards’ death sent him spiralling, sending him into a bout of depression – something he first started facing in school, but has only just addressed.
“I’ve always had real lows in my life,” he said.
“But it wasn’t really till last year that I actually addressed it.”
Just before Edwards’ death, Seaborn was also diagnosed with a tumour when she was six months pregnant, which required surgery that couldn’t go ahead until after she gave birth.
They considered delivering Jupiter early, but instead she carried the child to term and had successful surgery in June.
As if that wasn’t traumatic enough, Sheeran also found himself in court defending a plagiarism lawsuit over his hit song ‘Shape of You’ - a suit he ended up winning.
After Edwards’ passing, another one of Sheeran’s friends, Australian cricket star Shane Warne, died in early March in tragic circumstances.
“I felt like I didn’t want to live anymore,” he went on.
“And I have had that throughout my life.… You’re under the waves drowning. You’re just sort of in this thing. And you can’t get out of it.”
Sheeran said he felt ‘selfish’ for those emotions, especially ‘as a father’, adding: "I feel really embarrassed about it.”
But Seaborn figured out what was going on and urged her partner to seek help from a therapist.
“No one really talks about their feelings where I come from,” Sheeran said.
“People think it’s weird getting a therapist in England.… I think it’s very helpful to be able to speak with someone and just vent and not feel guilty about venting. Obviously, like, I’ve lived a very privileged life. So my friends would always look at me like, ‘Oh, it’s not that bad.’”
Sheeran said such help ‘isn’t a button that is pressed, where you’re automatically okay’.
Instead, he explained, it is ‘something that will always be there and just has to be managed’.
Ed Sheeran: The Sum Of It All premieres on Disney+ on 3 May.
Topics: Celebrity, TV and Film, Documentaries, Ed Sheeran, Music
Jess Hardiman