Clara McGregor discusses her mental health issues, saying that her struggle started when she was a child when she suffered 'separation anxiety' from her parents.

• Oct 15, 2021

AceShowbiz - Clara McGregor, the daughter of actor Ewan McGregor, has revealed her past Xanax use caused her to "forget whole chunks of days."

The model, who was recently appointed a global ambassador for Bluebella lingerie, notes she has suffered from chronic anxiety from the age of four and was later prescribed tranquillisers.

"I would have panic attacks and had problems sleeping. I would burst out crying and it was intense, and I didn't know what it meant," she tells The Mirror.

"I had separation anxiety from my parents, I had general anxieties and fears, usually little kid things like being scared of the dark, but mine were more extreme. I was scared of people breaking into the house. Mum and dad were amazing, they had to do a lot of research to figure out the best way to help me."

It wasn't until her family and her boyfriend intervened that she sought help.

"Around four years ago my family and my partner Jimmy spotted that things were getting out of hand," she continues, sharing that they told her, "You're just not yourself anymore."

"When I was on Xanax I had no energy, and I would start forgetting things," she adds. "That's the scary thing, I would forget whole chunks of days. It was incredibly hard for me to get off them, but I didn't want to be in that space anymore and would never consider taking one again."

Clara credits therapy and the support of her loved ones with helping her cope.

"Anxiety is suffocating," she shares. "I'm 25 now and I've spent a lot of time working on it with therapy but it's only in the last three to four years that I feel less constricted by it. My sister Esther and my mum are a great help. If I'm going through it, it often helps just to talk through it with them."

She is set to start work on a movie with her dad that's "loosely inspired" by their own lives - Ewan will play a struggling father who takes his drug-addicted daughter to rehab.

"My father is playing my father in the film, and it's a road trip film and it's something that was very loosely inspired off of our relationship," she says.

''There is nothing you're going to see in the movie and the characters that has anything to do with us, but I've taken certain emotional concepts and the concept of addiction and family bonding and some of the issues that my dad and I dealt with and I put it on to these other characters in a different world in different situations."