Sharon Horgan opens up about ‘aftershock’ following daughter’s meningitis scare: ‘There’s definitely PTSD’

Sharon Horgan has opened up about having post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after her eldest daughter was diagnosed with meningitis as a baby.

The Irish actor, who will star in the forthcoming BBC One drama Best Interests with Michael Sheen, said she drew on the experience in order to play her character in the new series.

Horgan’s daughter survived the life-threatening illness, but it left an “aftershock” on her mother.

“We were so unbelievably lucky and we know that,” the Bad Sisters star told The Times in a new interview, published today (Sunday 11 June).

“But the aftershock – there’s definitely PTSD and I dealt with any of my second daughter’s illnesses with blind panic because you always think, ‘If it can happen, why couldn’t it happen again?’”

Both of Horgan’s daughters, Sadhbh and Amer, are now teenagers. She shares them with her ex-husband, Jeremy Rainbird.

Best Interests tells the story of Nicci (Horgan), a mother who sues the NHS after doctors decide her Marnie (Niamh Moriarty) should be taken off life support after her condition, muscular dystrophy, deteriorates.

Horgan stars opposite Sheen, who plays Nicci’s husband Andrew. In the show, Andrew is torn between his love for Marnie and his unwillingness to support his wife’s case.

The friction between Nicci and Andrew shows that they “had a real relationship that has difficulties”, Horgan said.

“When things get really, really bad, the accusations are there, a certain amount of finger-pointing, which happens anyway, just even in normal parenting,” she explained.

After her divorce from Rainbird in 2019, Horgan said the adjustment to co-parenting made her doubt if she was a good mother.

During an appearance on Desert Island Discs in 2020, she told host Lauren Laverne: “I was fun mum for years. I entirely thought that was my role but that changes when you co-parent.

“Everything changes and you take on a lot more roles and I am much more practical than I was, and I think that is a positive thing.”

She continued: “It had some dips in the middle where I thought, ‘Oh, that thing I thought I was, which was a good mother, I am not entirely sure about’.

“When you bring anything like that into your kid’s life it’s tricky, when you turn the roles upside down, but it balances out and everything eased back.”