SINEAD O'Connor is getting ready to release a new album of original music, Theology, this month. Therefore, she's talking up a storm to the press again, and naturally making headlines while she's at it. Sinead, now 40, reveals that she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder after checking herself into the hospital for suicidal thoughts she's harbored since the age of 23. With the help of medication, she's feeling now like the glass is half-full rather than half-empty.

"I began to have this quiet little voice every now and then, although 'voice' is the wrong way to put it. It's your own thoughts just gone completely skew-whiff - 'Look at that tree, you might hang yourself on it.' Until the volume went up so loud that I took myself to hospital," the singer told The Times of London during an interview.

"There would be nothing wrong in your life, but you'd think about suicide all the time. It was almost funny. But after Shane was born I was really ill, and I was really worried because I was close to actually doing it. So when he was about five months old, I took myself to hospital."

Shane is her 3-year-old, fathered by Irish trad musician Donal Lunny. Prior to his birth she had been seeing therapists, and in fact spent some time in hospital before, all to no avail. The bipolar diagnosis, though, changed everything. "Within half an hour it was like cement going over the hole," she says.

After the birth of her son Yeshua - dad is American Frank Bonadio - four months ago, the singer thought she could kick the drugs for good, but that's not proven to be the case. "I was hoping that perhaps the thing would disappear and I'd be grand, but I wasn't. So I've been back on them now since he was eight weeks," she says.

What else is new with Sinead? Same old same old really. She says her late, abusive mother was possessed by the devil. And Bonadio doesn't live with her, nor have they really "dated" like most couples usually do, but they decided to have a child because they knew they'd always be together, and her biological clock was ticking. (Oh yeah, she's using birth control now she says, just in case of an accident.)

As regards to her mom, Sinead told Ireland's Sunday Independent that she knows of two people who had the devil inside, and Mrs. O'Connor was one of them. (The other she won't name, unfortunately.)

"I wouldn't believe it unless I'd seen it with my own two eyes. I believe she was possessed. I've seen pictures of her from before I ever met her, where there's this happy, lovely person full of light and life, and then it was like something had taken over," Sinead reckons.

She had been attempting to make peace with her mother prior to her death in 1985. "The thing that made it really hard for me to get off the f***ing floor was my mother dying," says the singer.

Now firmly entrenched in motherhood with four kids - her eldest, Jake, is 20 - Sinead says life is good despite all the prior setbacks. Speaking of Yeshua she says, "He's just so cute, smiling at you in the middle of the night. And because he's the last one, you've got to appreciate it all, even if you are tired."