Latest Update: Whoopi Goldberg Opens Up About Mother’s ‘Mental Issues’ on ‘The View…..See More

Whoopi Goldberg is sharing vulnerable details about her mother’s battle with mental illness.

During the Thursday, Jan. 9 episode of The View, the talk show host and EGOT winner opened up about her personal experience witnessing her mom, Emma Johnson, struggle with mental illness when Goldberg was just a child.

It was during a conversation with ABC News Chief International Correspondent James Longman, who was a guest on the show to discuss his memoir The Inherited Mind, in which he writes about his family’s history with mental illness.

While praising Longman for sharing his story, Goldberg, 69, talked about how the way society deals with mental illness has changed.

“I find that how people felt about these things, how they hid them in the ’50s and ’60s, started to evolve as kids got older and said, ‘You should not be hiding me. You should be helping me figure out what’s going on,'” Goldberg stated. “So we’ve gotten better at saying, ‘There are better ways to do this.'”

She added, “Because before you couldn’t get—if your parent went to the hospital, you never saw them again until they came out…And nobody ever told you anything. And you’re left going, ‘Is it me?’ And that starts a whole other thing.”

If they have mental issues, as my mom did, and you suddenly start developing things, you’re like, ‘Wait a minute. I’m not doing this. Somebody needs to talk to me.’”

Goldberg then brought up her own memoir, Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me, in which she shared the details of the time her mother was sent to the hospital for electroshock treatment.

Goldberg, who was 8 years old at the time, said her mom didn’t remember who she or her brother was when she returned.

Living without my mother, who was always my world, who had always been that center of gravity. Suddenly the center of gravity wasn’t there,” she explained to PEOPLE in a May 2024 interview.