Lauren Daigle says she found healing in music amid mental health scare, panic attacks
Grammy Award-winning Christian singer Lauren Daigle recently spoke about going through a dark time in her mental health as she rose to stardom and faced stress during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In an interview with People magazine, the 31-year-old singer opened up about how writing music helped her through her mental health issues and influenced her latest album, My Whole World Fell Apart.
Daigle rose to fame in 2015 when her song “How Can It Be” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Top Christian Albums chart. She also had three No. 1 singles on the Billboard Christian Airplay chart ("First," "Trust in You" and "O'Lord").
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In 2018, Daigle’s album Look Up Child, which featured the song "You Say," debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 chart. It reached the masses and became the highest-charting Christian album ever produced by a woman in over 20 years.
However, after she became famous, Daigle recalled embarking on a battle with her mental health that she said stemmed from a combination of "disappointment with grief and loss and the state of the world.”
“I felt like I didn’t know myself anymore. I started developing panic attacks,” she said. “I found myself at a rock bottom.”
Daigle said part of her healing journey was creating music as an outlet to channel her pain, writing the song “Thank God I do" amid her mental health struggles.
"I'd just be writing songs or coming up with different melodies and lyrics, and I remember thinking, 'This is different than what people have known of me in the past, but not different from myself,'" Daigle said.
As she navigated finding recovery from mental health issues, Daigle said, “my whole world fell apart, and I had to learn how to find myself again."
Daigle recently released a self-titled album through mainstream label Atlantic Records, which was done in a partnership with Centricity Music.
"For all the fans that have been with me in my journey from the very, very, very beginning, this is no different than a ‘You Say’ moment for me,” she added. “These are other little pieces of me that you're now going to get to learn of as well."
"There's this Bible verse that says, 'The word of God is alive and active, sharper than any two-edged sword. It can cut through bone and marrow, soul and spirit.' And I'm like, 'The soul and spirit, they're so intertwined.'"
Daigle added that this was "a song that I'd write from the spirit for the spirit; these songs of heartache and longing and difficulty and joy and newness and all that, they're coming from this soul lane, but there's these other God songs that are also me as well."
Daigle posted on her Instagram account on Tuesday, expressing gratitude for her nominations for awards for the KLove Fans Awards, which will be held the evening of May 28 at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, Tennessee.
“I am so honored to be nominated for ‘Artist of the Year’ and ‘Female Artist of the Year’ at the @klovefanawards,” she wrote on Instagram. “I’m excited to spend the weekend with my friends from all over the country!”
Nicole Alcindor is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: nicole.alcindor@christianpost.com.
