JK Rowling had therapy to cope with Harry Potter success

The telegraph report how Jo needed help to cope with the pressures of fame and fortune – a woman who went from leaving in a bedsit on benefits to being the first billionaire author in history.

The author, who has sold more than 450 million books since publishing her first Harry Potter book 15 years ago, said that she had turned to therapy while feeling at “rock bottom” when writing her first book in Edinburgh, where she was living in a bedsit with her young daughter and surviving on benefits.

“And I had to do it again when my life was changing so suddenly – and it really helped,” she said. “I’m a big fan of it, it helped me a lot.

“For a few years I did feel I was on a psychic treadmill, trying to keep up with where I was. Everything changed so rapidly, so strangely. I knew no one who’d ever been in the public eye. I didn’t know anyone – anyone – to whom I could turn and say, “what do you do?”, so it was incredibly disorienting.”

Though the article covers much of what happened in the interview from The Guardian can be read in full here.