Everyone loves Gabourey Sidibe, what’s not to love? She’s talented, fierce, and knows how to light up a room with wit, charm, and her infectious laugh.

Last week, she revealed that she worked as a phone sex operator before making it big in her breakthrough role as Precious. She also spoke about having suicidal thoughts and her struggle with mental illness.

In her new autobiography This is Just My Face: Try Not to Stare, she shared that she was diagnosed with depression and bulimia after it nearly took her life in college.

“Often, when I was too sad to stop crying, I drank a glass of water and ate a slice of bread, and then I threw it up,” she writes in the book. “After I did, I wasn’t as sad anymore; I finally relaxed. So I never ate anything, until I wanted to throw up – and only when I did could I distract myself from whatever thought was swirling around my head. I found a doctor and told her everything that was wrong with me. I’d never run down the entire list before, but as I heard myself, I could sense that dealing with this on my own was definitely no longer an option.”

She continued: “The doctor asked me if I wanted to kill myself. I said, ‘Meh, not yet. But when I do, I know how I’ll do it.’ I wasn’t afraid to die, and if there was a button I could’ve pushed to erase my existence from earth, I would have pushed it because it would have been easier and less messy than offing myself. According to the doctor, that was enough.”

Gabourey also explained the benefits of seeking help in therapy:

“Here’s the thing about therapy and why it’s so important,” she writes. “I love my mom, but there’s so much I couldn’t talk to her about during my Hoe Phase. I couldn’t tell her that I couldn’t stop crying and that I hated everything about myself. Whenever I did try to open up, my mom seemed unconcerned. When I was sad about something, she told me to ‘get a thicker skin.’ When I was upset, she told me to ‘stop nitpicking.’ My mom has always had faith that things would be okay, but saying ‘tomorrow will be a better day’ wasn’t enough for me.”

She continued: “When I first told her I was depressed, she laughed at me. Literally. Not because she’s a terrible person, but because she thought it was a joke. [She wondered] How could I not be able to feel better on my own, like her, like her friends, like normal people? So I just kept thinking my sad thoughts — thoughts about dying.”