Charlotte Church has spoken for the first time about finding her mum Maria unconscious after taking an overdose of sleeping pills and parcetemol.

Maria, who is diagnosed as bipolar, took the pills after finding out that her husband James had been having an affair with a family friend and Charlotte told OK magazine recently: “When I found her, I didn’t panic, I just went straight into this calm mode - I had to.”

Charlotte recalled how she had to wake up Maria by slapping her face so that she could find out what she’d taken: “It was a tough time. At first when I found her, I was angry because I thought she’d tried to kill herself.”

“But she said all she had wanted to do was sleep for a few days to forget about what had happened. She said she wasn’t trying to kill herself, or so she says.”

“Luckily she hadn’t done herself too much damage. She was put on a drip to prevent liver damage and kept under surveillance for a couple of days.”

Charlotte added that Maria has been self-harming during her down cycles since the age of 20: “Sometimes she used to show me her scars when she was drunk, but she would never dare cut herself in front of me. I’d go mad.”