Juliana Hatfield carved her niche in indie rock in the early Nineties and now has a successful career spanning 10 albums. But for much of her life the singer-songwriter from Boston has been pursued by the twin demons of anorexia and depression.

Last month her weight dropped to a new low of seven stone and two pounds, just 75 per cent of her ideal body weight. She had thought herself free of the condition, but a friend told her: 'Juliana, you are anorexic.'

Confronted with the reality, Hatfield, 41, checked into an eating disorder clinic for the first time. She found herself one of seven anorexics or bulimics following a strict regime of eating under supervision six times a day. Monitors stood outside the toilet door to make sure she was not vomiting up her food.

During the 10 days she spent in the clinic, Hatfield had internet access and began recording her experiences on her blog. 'I needed to reach out to people,' she told The Observer. 'I needed support from anywhere I could find it. I wanted to tell the truth and let people know what was going on. I'd had to cancel a book reading without an explanation, so it only seemed fair. I've had tons of reaction: people have been very sweet and kind.'

She added: 'Writing helps me process things that are happening to me. There's part of me that feels disquiet at giving so much of myself away and I don't know if the effects are going to come back and bite me on the butt, but everyone else is doing it.'

Hatfield, who recently wrote an autobiography, has been described as a star of 'the post-Nirvana grunge gold rush' of the early Nineties, when she had hits with 'My Sister', 'Spin the Bottle' and 'Universal Heartbeat'. Her official website quotes music historian Brett Milano writing of her early career: 'She was a willowy beauty with charming shyness and a slightly tragic air.'

She has had a long struggle with depression and, after her father died in 2001, began a course of cognitive behavioural therapy. She is now hopeful of having turned the corner and has concerts, book signings and readings coming up next month. 'I'm feeling better and on the right track. I'm a damaged person, but I have hope and a will to not give up.'

Here is the raw and unflinching account of Hatfield's experience inside the clinic in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Sometimes I feel like a human pin cushion. Every painful emotion hits me with ridiculously exaggerated force. And the anxiety feels like hands inside of me, squeezing my guts really hard.

For the most part I have not ever been inclined to escape with drugs and alcohol. In the drugs-and-alcohol sense, I am - and have always been - very straight. My coping mechanism - or one of them, the one that kicked into high gear again most recently - has been restricting food.

We swim through the deep, dark oceans to reach the crowded shore; lots of people have made it through the same sort of experiences. We are not alone. It just feels like we are when we are in the thick of it. And after one of us endures one of these things, she may be transformed into a more humble and compassionate person, 'high-fiving' all the other freaks and mental defectives and addicts who have continued to survive and to try.

I am having to come to terms with the fact that, at age 41, I found myself unravelling. Or, rather, I unravelled. I wasn't fully conscious of it. Others around me noticed it before I did. A good friend forced me to confront the fact that I was in serious trouble. 'You need to get well' were his words.

He was there when I woke up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat - pyjamas soaked, hair wet, sheets wet, even the pillow with a head-sized wet spot on it. He witnessed my fatigue, my falling asleep every time he put on a movie for us at night. I tried so hard to stay awake with him to watch Sunshine and Network (for about the fifth time - I love that one; I never get sick of it) and The Strangers and the DVD with Robert Thurman talking with the Dalai Lama, but they are all blurry in my mind.

I was dehydrated and anaemic - anaemia caused by malnutrition - and I didn't even know it. I didn't realise the seriousness of my problem until I had already entered dangerous territory. My anxiety was so great and all-consuming (funny choice of words, considering I was 'consuming' so little) that at some point I lost my appetite completely, and it was no more about restricting food but became an almost inability to eat. My weight went as low as it has ever been in my adult lifetime.

They tell me here at the treatment centre that people have been hospitalised for being as low as I was when I came here. (I found that kind of alarmist and hard to believe - I was still sceptical and in a little bit of denial, like everyone is when they first come in for treatment for anything anywhere - but it scared me anyway.) In this environment they shorten 'eating disorders' - the name of our problem - to 'ED' and say it like a man's name ('Ed'), like he is a bad man, an evil man whom we need to cast out of our lives, our psyches.

Before computers you never would have found me blabbing so openly like this about this. This is me being modern. Damn these computers and this interweb and the pressure on us musicians to update constantly and to communicate. It encourages, inspires oversharing. It's so easy to say too much and to feel safe giving away one's private secrets.

But screw it. I have nothing to hide. I've been embarrassing myself publicly for over 20 years. Why should I stop now? A heart that hurts is a heart that works. I will shout it from the rooftop (as I contemplate jumping but then ultimately don't, and walk back indoors). I am not dead inside. I still care about right and wrong. I refuse to succumb, to accept that I can't fix this. I want desperately to be a better, happier, healthier, saner person and companion. My will to endure is, so far, unkillable.

They make us eat six times a day. Three meals and three snacks. We all sit in the kitchen together and there is a monitor at the head of the table making sure we eat everything on our plates and drink everything in our cups. This is called the refeeding process. It must be done slowly and steadily, with more food added on as time progresses so we don't shock our systems. So we are not in danger of ending up like Karen Carpenter - she gained too much weight too fast after starving for a long time and her heart couldn't take it.

The bathroom doors are locked so the bulimics can't go in and puke. (I myself have never been a purger.) When you need to go, you must ask a monitor to unlock the door for you, and after she lets you in she stands just outside the door and then you must either count while you are on the toilet, loud enough so that she can hear you, right up until the moment you exit, or you must let her flush for you after you are done so that there is proof that you didn't vomit your food into the toilet.

Every morning they wake us up at seven and we all go and have our vitals (temperature, blood pressure) checked and have ourselves weighed. I have gained five pounds so far. I'm doing well. I'm a model patient, weight gaining-wise. My mental/emo health is another story - a longer story, a work in progress.

All I want is to be well and to have energy and to get back on track and to have my quiet little life back. It was a lonely and solitary life, but it was mine. And I was basically healthy-ish. And I was free, in a sense.