Real Life: Masterchef Julie Goodwin on mental health breakdown - ‘Anyone could’ve seen a crash was coming’

Original MasterChef Australia winner Julie Goodwin. Photo / Stephen Barker

Inaugural Masterchef winner Julie Goodwin has lifted the lid on the personal price she paid for her sudden rise to fame, revealing she’s been hospitalised multiple times for mental health reasons.

Goodwin, who won the first ever season of Masterchef in 2009, was in New Zealand last week for the Auckland Food Show.

As one of Australia’s most beloved celebrities, she shocked the nation when in 2020 she revealed she’d been admitted to hospital following what she describes as a nervous breakdown.

“Anxiety was a tremendous part of my life. I was constantly in a state of fear. I had severe depression and I felt dread all of the time without quite knowing why,” she told Newstalk ZB’s Real Life with John Cowan on Sunday night.

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“I just kept ignoring all the symptoms before my brain went, ‘well if you’re not going to listen to me, I’ll send it out to your body’. I became physically really sick as well – I had sores on my scalp, shaky hands, ulcerated mouth, dizziness.”

Goodwin is in the process of writing a memoir about her mental health battle, and says looking back at her packed schedule over the last few years for research has been an eye-opening experience.

In the years after winning Masterchef, a number of career opportunities presented themselves for Goodwin. She started running a cooking school, working as a radio host, presenting on TV, and writing books, columns and recipes.

She said balancing all her commitments became overwhelming.

Advertise with NZME.Julie is ecstatic to have won the title of Australia’s first MasterChef. Photo / Masterchef

“When I go back to my calendar over the last few years, I think anyone could look at that and see that there’s a crash coming, because there is just too much,” she told Cowan.

“Breakfast radio takes its toll. You have to go to bed at 8pm and get up at 4am, and then I would go from there to my cooking school, which would often take me past the optimum bedtime, and that was every weekend as well. So I was working seven days a week, and they were not eight-hour days.

“There was a fear that if I said no to opportunities, everything would go away. There’s that sense of obligation. And after a while, the decisions were taken away from me because I had a nervous breakdown.”

Before entering Masterchef, Goodwin was a Christian youth worker, and her faith remains an integral part of her life. But she says she was in such a deep hole during that tough period of her life that she found God “hard to find”.

“God went missing, joy went missing. It was a terrible time. I believe with all my heart in the power of gratitude and in finding the good in things and people, and I knew that’s what I had to do – but I couldn’t do it.”

Now, Goodwin is in a much better place. She swims, meditates and sees a psychologist regularly, makes sure to get eight hours sleep, eats well and doesn’t drink. She’s also on medication and now assesses everything through the lens of ‘does this fill my cup, or does it empty me?’

Julie Goodwin guest judge in Masterchef Australia. Photo / Supplied

She says it’s been a long journey that continues to this day.

“I’ve been hospitalised multiple times. It’s not a straight line from A to B, from sickness to health – it’s a process that requires a lot of commitment. I have those things in place every day that I have to do every day to keep well.”

Real Life is a weekly interview show where John Cowan speaks with prominent guests about their life, upbringing, and the way they see the world. Tune in Sundays from 7:30pm on Newstalk ZB.

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