Scott Morrison has confessed that he sometimes struggled to get out of bed during his time as prime minister due to debilitating anxiety.
The former prime minister revealed the pressures of the top job left him so anxious he had to be prescribed medication.
The 55-year-old shared a candid insight into his mental health battles in his new book Plans for Your Good: A Prime Minister’s Testimony of God’s Faithfulness.
He said he could not identify a particular moment in his role as Prime Minister that triggered the anxiety, but added there were many factors at play.
‘It was a very stressful period and the combination of the weight of the problems, the amount of hours we were working, the physical demands they brought and, to be honest, things in China were just as distressing, if not more so, than the pandemic.’ he said The Australian.
Scott Morrison has revealed he sometimes struggled to get out of bed during his time as Prime Minister due to debilitating anxiety.
Morrison said the Covid-19 pandemic and trade tariffs imposed by China on Australian products such as wine and barley only increased anxiety.
Tensions with China rose as Morrison called for an independent investigation into the origins of Covid.
He said that most of his time at The Lodge was “debilitating and agonizing”, and that without anxiety medication he would have fallen into a deep depression.
“My doctor was surprised that I had lasted this long before seeking help,” Mr Morrison wrote in his book.
‘Without this help, serious depression would have set in. What struck me was the combination of sheer physical exhaustion with the relentless, callous brutality of politics and media attacks.’
Morrison said that while that was all part of the job as a public figure, “politicians were not made of stone.”
‘You fear the future and you can’t get out of bed. It can shut you down mentally and physically. It steals your joy and can damage relationships. I know this from personal experience,” she wrote.
The former prime minister tried focusing on other hobbies to calm his anxiety, such as swimming and cooking, but the mental anguish was too much to bear without medication.
The former prime minister revealed that the pressures from high office left him so anxious that he had to be prescribed medication.
Unlike many other memoirs written by politicians, Morrison says his book focuses more on how his religious faith has guided him throughout his life.
Morrison was Australia’s 30th Prime Minister from 2018 to 2022 before losing to Anthony Albanese in the 2022 election.
He was replaced by Liberal candidate Simon Kennedy as federal MP for Cook in southern Sydney in the recent by-election.
Morrison retired from politics in February this year and became a strategic advisor to DYNE Maritime, a US-based, Australian-founded venture capital firm that invests in technologies related to the AUKUS pact.
He is also vice president of American Global Strategies, which was co-founded and chaired by Robert O’Brien, who was national security advisor to US President Donald Trump from 2019 to 2021.
Morrison is seen with his wife Jenny and daughters Lily and Abbey.