LeAnn Rimes has long been open about her battles with anxiety and depression. In 2012, when she entered a 30-day inpatient rehab facility to address her mental health, she was open about her reasons for doing so.

"This is just a time for me to emotionally check out for a second and take care of myself and come back in 30 days as the best 30-year-old woman I can be," she explained in a statement to People at the time.

Now, a decade later, Rimes looks back at that period in her life as a very difficult one, exacerbated by the stresses of achieving fame at the young age of 13 and spending the years ahead adopting a "the show must go on" mentality, even at the cost of her mental and physical health.

"I was in a very, very dark place. I had never been alone," she explains in a new interview with Insider. "There was always someone around, whether it be a parent or a manager, an agent or a publicist, or a husband, or whatever it was."

She goes on to say that being in the public eye from such a young age made her feel that she had to "override my humanness," even forcing herself to perform when she was too unwell to do so. She remembers "showing up onstage with a 104-degree fever," for example.

"I fainted backstage at 14," Rimes continues. "I've had to walk off a couple of times onstage and just be like, 'I can't finish the show.'"

When she checked into treatment, the singer says it was a chance to break from the punishing schedule of life as a touring country star and reexamine her priorities.

"It was just time," she goes on to say. "It was time for me to break away from my deep codependency and figure out what was chemically going on to be able to take care of myself."

Rimes has previously reflected on how her mental health struggles impacted her marriage to actor Eddie Cibrian, pointing out that the people closest to her felt the weight of her battles with depression and anxiety firsthand.

“At one point, there was such a weight on my marriage,” the singer recounted, going on to add that her course of treatment helped her break away from her patterns of co-dependency. "By being able to care for my own body and not expecting Eddie to do it for me, we’ve been able to become better partners," she added.

These days, Rimes is feeling stronger than ever, and continuing to chart new, ambitious musical courses. Her next album, God's Work, comes out on Sept. 16.

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