This post deals with addiction, drug use and suicide and might be triggering for some readers.

In 2009, Fiona O'Loughlin slurred her words and insulted the crowd who had come to see her show at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre. Then she collapsed.

Having spent hours each day for weeks before that show rehearsing forDancing With The Stars, exhaustion was initially blamed for the stand-up comedian's odd behaviour.

But shortly after, the now-57-year-old went public with a previously private battle, announcing her struggle with alcoholism.

Watch: Fiona O'Loughlin discusses her alcoholism on I'm a Celebrity. Post continues below video.

"I had an overwhelming sense of relief," O'Loughlin told the ABC's Australian Story in 2014. "And maybe I should've felt more embarrassed. I felt very bad for the people in the audience."

She said she often wondered if making it public was wise, as it set herself up for a lot of falls.

Alcohol had regularly been a punchline of O'Loughlin's jokes, and she told SA Weekend she'd considered herself to have a problem as early as 2000, but husband Chris, with whom she shares five children, disagreed.

That same year, then 36, she performed at the Adelaide Fringe Festival, drinking excessively every day for a month.

In 2008 she was admitted to hospital three times.

Listen: Fiona O'Loughlin speaks to The Quicky. Post continues below audio.

After making her experience public in 2009, O'Loughlin went to rehab, but her sobriety didn't last.

She had never performed a stand-up show without drinking two small bottles of vodka and didn't think she ever could, so she soon found herself living a double life.

By 2012, she had fully relapsed. The drinking was so extreme that one night in Canberra she woke in her hotel bed with a stranger. When her husband Chris called later, she failed to properly hang up the phone, and he heard her speaking to the man. Their marriage was over.

O'Loughlin moved to Melbourne, and in 2013 booked into a hotel under a pseudonym. She intended to take her life.

"I had gone missing and [her youngest daughter Mary] just went to the hotel and asked for me and they said, 'No, she’s not here'," O'Loughlin toldAustralian Story.

"Mary just knew in her heart that I was there and she would not leave. She described what I looked like and sure enough I was there."

She was then sober for a year. That was until she celebrated herAustralian Storyepisode - focussed on about her journey to sobriety - by drinking.

Around this time, O'Loughlin fell into a coma and was given just a seven per cent chance of survival.

Over the course of a month, she had become the victim of carbon monoxide poisoning from the heater in her apartment.

"It went over the course of a month. I forgot things, I thought I was getting early Alzheimer's. I was forgetting things, forgetting my kids' names. But then I did forget I was an alcoholic," she told Gold104.3's Jo & Lehmo in 2017.

She was slowly poisoned and ended up in a coma for four weeks.

In 2015, O'Loughlin's friend organised for her to stay with a 'healer' in a Adelaide's beachside Glenelg. The 'healer' was an ex-heroin addict, and part of her 'treatment' was occasional meth use.

While living here, O'Loughlin met her now-manager Sue Underwood, who lived next door and supported her through the lowest period in her life.

She left the drug den and moved back in with her parents on the Yorke Peninsula.

From here, she experienced a series of involuntary admissions to a psychiatric hospital and rehab facilities before returning to Melbourne to restart her career.

A career breakthrough came in 2018, when she was cast in Channel 10'sI'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!, but the experience led to another relapse when she consumed alcohol-based hand sanitiser during her time on the show.

"My mind started playing games with me," she told theDaily Telegraph. "It is so nonsensical now, but I felt that I was the schmuck and everyone in Australia was laughing at me and that was why I was so close to winning. I didn't know what was being edited and what was out there.

"I freaked and planned to [drink the sanitiser]. In the middle of the night I just f***ing did it."

In an interview withThe Projectin October 2020, O'Loughlin added, "basically it was a relapse, and I kept having these relapses, and that's kind of what I wanted to really drive home, is part of this disease that people don't really understand, the cruelty of it is when you're in it is the relapsing," she said. "I only knew about hand sanitiser because I'd been to so many rehabs."

O'Loughlin said she drank the product on multiple occasions and that, just a few days shy of winning the series (in which she earned $100,000 for her chosen charity, Angel Flight), producers noticed her stumbling and slurring her speech.

She was treated on set.

"If they'd pulled me out of the jungle and I'd had to explain why, I don't know that I was well enough at that point," she said.

"I think it was probably reckless of me [to do the show]. That is the problem with addicts, we think we do but we don't have our own best interests at heart."

The mother-of-five also spoke in detail onI'm a Celebrityabout her disease, which she described as being "shrouded in shame" to the point she could barely look at her own reflection.

"It is particularly shameful being a mother," she said. "When you’re a chronic alcoholic like I am, there are only three endings. There is death, jail or institution. That is it."

Speaking to Channel 9 last year, she added, "The reason I do continue to talk about it, is in case there is someone out there... Not that I'm a saint at all, but I just get something that I don't think we're understanding [as a society]: As long as there is alcohol there will always be alcoholics; there's a certain amount of us that this stuff is poison to."

O'Loughlin has reportedly now been sober for a year, following a relapse while filming Channel 7'sThe All New Montyin 2019.

"Not a drink has passed my lips, nor a codeine tablet," since filming that show, she toldSA Weekend. "And that's the first time I've been able to say that."

Speaking toMamamia's daily news podcastThe Quicky, O'Loughlin said her high profile career "fast-tracked" her addiction.

"I now recognise my experience of what alcohol did to me was different to normal people. My drinking was never normal, I didn't realise that, but I think my career fast-tracked my alcoholism," she explained.

"It's a progressive disease, and I was about a five, I guess, when I started and I fast-tracked it to 10. I think had I not been a stand-up, I would've still fast-tracked to 10 but it would've taken 10 years longer."