Carly Pearce Opens Up About Her “Crippling” Mental Health Struggles

Carly Pearce is getting candid about her mental health. During an interview on Bunnie XO’s Dumb Blonde podcast, the country singer revealed that she’s long dealt with anxiety and OCD.

For years, Pearce said she believed her anxiety started amid her 2020 divorce from Michael Ray and the pandemic that followed. However, upon further reflection, Pearce came to realize she’d been dealing with mental health issues since she was six or seven.

“I’ve had crippling OCD since I was a child,” she said. “So like checking my backpack over and over and over, checking my alarm over and over and over.”

The disorder would also rear its head during thunderstorms.

“I remember her taking me to the local library to meet a meteorologist to try to calm that,” Pearce said. “So, I’ve had anxiety my whole life. I still struggle with OCD.”

The “debilitating” anxiety and OCD reached another peak during the pandemic, with Pearce explaining, “I think it just really came to a head of me wanting to do something about it during COVID.”

That realization came amid the challenging time in which Pearce was struggling with heartbreak and also unable to perform.

“Being taken off the road, going through a public divorce, I think my body just had, like, a visceral reaction of like, ‘Oh my God,’” she said. “I can’t tell you how many interviews I sat through trying so hard to just, like, keep myself together. It’s been a journey for me… I felt like I was trapped in my own body.”

Carly Pearce Reveals Origins of Her Mental Health Issues

As for what caused her mental health issues, Pearce said that she grew up with a mom who was “a perfectionist.”

“She’s the best, but she’s a perfectionist,” Pearce said of her mother. “She never left the house without her makeup on. She was always just so put together.”

Seeing that behavior, Pearce believes, exacerbated her own mental health issues.

“She didn’t mean to do that to me,” Pearce said of her mom. “It wasn’t like she was like, ‘You have to be this way.’ But I watched and led by example, so then I wanted to have everything perfect.”

Now, though, with therapy and other coping mechanisms, Pearce has come to learn how to manage her symptoms.

“I got really conditioned over the last 10 years to just zip it up and deal with it,” she said. “It just kind of got to a place where a couple years ago I just had to really start back into therapy, start really trying to figure out all of these different things.” 

Photo by Terry Wyatt/Getty Images for ACM