Whatever happened to Sinéad O'Connor?

Her tweet last week, that she was in "serious danger", was just the latest apparent cry for help in a months-long downward spiral which has seen the 45-year-old Irish singer thrust herself back in the limelight after a quickie marriage to a therapist she met online, a slew of suicide threats and a hospitalisation for depression.

And after admitting that she took her new husband, Irish drugs counsellor Barry Herridge, on a hunt through the streets of Las Vegas for drugs after their December 9 wedding, leaving him "very frightened", the troubled singer last week revealed she had split from Herridge for good and had checked into hospital to be "put back together".

So, what happened to the woman whose haunting shaven-headed beauty in the iconic Nothing Compares 2 U video helped define the 90s, and why has she chosen to thrust herself back into the media spotlight whilst at her lowest ebb?  

‘I am not well at all'

Pals have pointed to Sinéad's history of depression and her diagnosis with bipolar disease, which she admitted to Oprah Winfrey on air back in 2007, also adding that she had attempted suicide on her 33rd birthday in December 1999.

And the singer has recently admitted that she has been off her bipolar medication, which has exacerbated her unstable behaviour.

"I realise I will be in trouble 4 doing this but… Ireland is a VERY hard place to find help in. So having tried other ways 1st I'm asking does any1 know a psychiatrist in Dublin or Wicklow who could urgently see me today please? I'm really u-well…and in danger," she tweeted last week, adding, "[A newspaper article] about them trying to lose Barry his job and every1 being s--t to him 4 marrying me has spun me off and I'm ill and I desperately need to get back on meds today. Am in serious danger."

And close sources have claimed that the singer has isolated herself following her split from her husband of one-and-a-half months, after weeks of being off and on.

Admitting that on January 5 she "took an overdose. God obviously wants me around - though I can't think why. I just had to make a cry for help," the four-times married mother-of-four also revealed that she is still using drugs, spilling of her behaviour after she left the Vegas wedding chapel with Barry on December 9, "We ended up in a cab in some place that was quite dangerous. I wasn't scared, but he's a drugs counsellor. What was I thinking?" Adding, "Then I was handed a load of crack. Barry was very frightened - that kind of messed everything up a bit really."

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