Actress Jamie-Lee O’Donnell has said she struggled with her mental health when she finished filming Derry Girls.

The actress – best known for playing Michelle Mallon in the hit Channel 4 show – enlisted in therapy after the show ended after she struggled with her mental health.

The star thought that she’d only need therapy for two weeks but instead found herself attending support services for eight months.

She said she thought the process would take two weeks, ‘because I didn’t have a lot of patience’. But she ended up attending therapy for eight months.

‘I learned how to love myself,’ she says before adding: ‘I learned how to like myself. I learned how to let go of everything and forgive, not for anybody else but for myself. Then to get onto the next chapter of my life.’

But the Derry native said moving onto the next chapter of her life was easier said than done.

‘I think life and every chapter is about learning, about growing, about evolving. It is a bit of a shock when you do a whole chunk of it and you suddenly realise that there is so much more to go. But it gets easier as you go along,’ she told the Sunday Independent.

It comes after Jamie-Lee recently revealed that she moved to Spain and cut ties with her own family.

‘So I did therapy, which was pretty intense and really tough, to be honest. And then I got to the end of it. I completed it. Cured, guys. All the healing’s done. And then it was like, right, now time to have a good big start for myself.

Jamie-Lee previously revealed that her therapy sessions led her to the decision to cut ties with her family back home.

‘Well, that’s part of the therapy. I had to go no contact with my entire family,’ she said.

‘But it’s just one of those things, you know. And the more I’ve sort of talked about it and been honest about it, I’m seeing it’s, unfortunately, not the most unusual thing for adults,’ she said at the time.