VIDEO: Hulk Hogan Opens Up About Suicidal Past

Hulk Hogan says he felt suicidal after his reality show ended and credits fans for saving his life.

In 2007, Hogan's life was caught in a downward spiral. He was involved in a messy divorce, his son had been arrested after a near-fatal car crash and then his reality show Hogan Knows Best was canceled.

"Everything got dark, everything happened at once," Hogan said on Oprah: Where Are They Now?  "I was drinking alcohol very heavily. It just all kept piling up, it all kept mounting and mounting I didn't know how to handle it. I always wondered how could someone possibly take their own life and so I got to that point where I said, 'You know what, maybe this would be easy. You know, maybe this would be an easy way to fix things.'"

Hogan goes on to recount the night that helped him start to overcome his depression. "I was with my family and a bunch of my friends at a table" in Miami on New Year's Eve, he told Oprah Winfrey. "And there's a bunch of negativity about the food being bad, you know the champagne didn't work, even though it was all consumed. And when I walked outside, some kid ran up and hugged me and was like, 'Oh I grew up watching you. I didn't have a dad, you're like a dad to me.' And there was another person that said 'Hey Hulk, we love you.'

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"And I went, 'Oh, my God', it was right then," Hogan continued. "I didn't understand what was going on, but it hit me that there's clean air and there's dirty air. And once I walked back inside again, I realized I couldn't take it anymore. I got sick and tired of being sick and tired. I got sick and tired of the hating, the negativity, the verbal abuse, just everything that I was hearing."

Hogan, who's now remarried, said that: "I now realize I had to go through all this stuff to be who I am today, to make me who I am today."