Emmerdale legend Charley Webb, beloved by soap fans as Debbie Dingle has bravely opened up about her beloved mum, Helen’s battle with early-onset dementia.

Charley spoke publicly back in 2023, revealing Helen was diagnosed with debilitating disease ten years ago while appearing on This Morning in her role as an ambassador for Alzheimer’s Research.

She said: ‘There was no support, no help, it was shocking actually, and for me and my siblings it has been eight years of hell. She’s now gone into a home and it was the hardest decision we’ve ever had to make.’

Charley detailed that, due to her mum’s huge involvement in her career, she noticed the early symptoms of the disease.

‘I got into working so young. Mum took over things like that and my sister’s make-up academy, and she was just forgetting things. She forgot something huge for me financially, and I thought ‘this is quite serious’ then she was confused about something with her house, and I thought ‘this doesn’t make sense.’

‘And people were like ‘you’re just being dramatic’ because I can be dramatic but I just knew. I was pregnant with my middle one Bowie. That was traumatic, trying to get the diagnosis is actually a long process.

‘It’s difficult, it’s hard, it was stressful. She had a big personality, she was much wilder than me. She would stay up until 4 in the morning with my friends, so seeing that decline was awful. I think she was in denial. She was young, she was 64, she never wanted to go to the doctors for anything. They looked for everything else, they checked her thyroid, did tests because I don’t think they thought it was that.’

Speaking further on Helen’s sad decline, Charley admitted: ‘My mum is so fit and healthy. Very glamorous, hair was always perfect, make-up perfect. You lose them right before your eyes.

‘That’s the hardest thing, because you grieve for the person they were. She’s like a little girl now and it’s taken me a long time to be able to talk about it, it’s such a personal and big thing but it feels like now is the right time.

‘One out of two of us will get dementia or care for someone with dementia, if we can do something about it now we should.’

Charley appeared on the Daily Mail’s Life of Briony podcast yesterday and opened up on why she chose to speak publicly about her families experience with dementia.

‘I felt selfish not talking about it because I knew how alone I’d felt, so I thought if I can just do a little bit more for the charity, I really want to do that. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone as when that diagnosis happened.

‘I think I chose not to speak about it for a long time, because my mum was a funny character, very glamorous, and I can just hear her voice in the back of my head saying, ‘Don’t you tell people that I’ve got that! I do not want people to know’. That’s just the way she was.

‘My mum was all about makeup and being glamorous and I just felt like I wanted to protect her privacy. Even though she wouldn’t have known that it was being spoken about, I think in in the back of my mind, I was like she would hate this.’

Charley then expressed: ‘To be honest, I still don’t think I’ve processed it. They say that you grieve when they’re here and you grieve when they’re gone’.

Charley opened up further about her difficulties in visiting her mum, detailing that it often leaves her emotional.

‘I think I have dealt with this situation in a bizarre way. I’m definitely a compartmentaliser, but I have to be honest, and I know this is controversial. But I really struggle to go see my mum without getting upset.

‘It’s hard, it’s not the person that you love’.

Charley went on to talk about how different she finds the visits than her sister, who leaves feeling ‘uplifted’.

‘My sister is so much better than me, she finds it so uplifting when she sees her,’ she said. ‘And I feel selfish, because I’m literally like, ‘Oh God I’ve got to go see my mum’. That is a controversial thing to say and I’m sure people will be like you’re awful, but I have to be honest, it’s not something I enjoy. It’s s**t.’

‘I really wish I could be that person that was like ‘I’m going to see my mum and it’s so great she’s still here’. I really don’t feel that, I do struggle with it. I think a lot of people find it harder than they let on. It’s not an easy thing to watch,’ she said.

Charley then went on to discuss the most difficult question she’s faced in the wake of her mum’s diagnosis: people asking how she is.

‘You’re not going to be able to say, ‘Oh she’s doing really well,’ because she’s not doing really well,’ she explained.