KATE MOSS suffered a nervous breakdown following her iconic nude 1992 Calvin Klein advert, in which she was photographed by Herb Ritts alongside Mark Wahlberg.

“I had a nervous breakdown when I was 17 or 18, when I had to go and work with Marky Mark and Herb Ritts,” Moss said. “It didn’t feel like me at all. I felt really bad straddling this buff guy. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t get out of bed for two weeks. I thought I was going to die. I went to the doctor and he said: ‘I’ll give you some Valium’, and Francesca Sorrenti [Moss' friend and mother of Mario Sorrenti], thank God, said: ‘You’re not taking that.’”

“It was just anxiety. Nobody takes care of you mentally. There’s a massive pressure to do what you have to do. I was really little, and I was going to work with Steven Meisel. It was just really weird – a stretch limo coming to pick you up from work. I didn’t like it. But it was work and I had to do it.”

The supermodel – who was scouted at the age of 14 – admitted that, in hindsight, she was too young to start modelling.

“I see a 16-year-old now, and to ask her to take her clothes off would feel really weird,” she said. “But they were like: ‘If you don’t do it, then we’re not going to book you again’. So I’d lock myself in the toilet and cry and then come out and do it.”

Moss said that her high-profile relationship with Johnny Depp helped her feel more at ease with herself. The couple were together for three years from 1994 to 1997, leaving the British beauty heartbroken.

“There’s nobody that’s ever really been able to take care of me. Johnny did for a bit. I believed what he said. Like if I said: ‘What do I do?’ – he’d tell me. And that’s what I missed when I left. I really lost that gauge of somebody I could trust,” he said. “It was a nightmare – years and years of crying. Oh, the tears.”

The interview in the December issue of Vanity Fair coincides with the release of her book, Kate: The Kate Moss Book, in which she credits Depp for having taught her a few life-long lessons.

“I was lucky to be with Johnny,” she writes. “He taught me a lot about fame. He told me ‘never complain, never explain’. That’s why I don’t use Twitter and things like that. I don’t want people to know what is true all the time and that’s what keeps the mystery.”

The Vogue cover girl also dismissed allegations that her teenage waif-life figure made “heroin chic” a fashionable ideal.

“I had never even taken heroin – it was nothing to do with me at all,” said Moss. “I think [stylist] Corinne Day – she wasn’t on heroin, but always loved that Lou Reed song, that whole glamorising the squat, white-and-black and sparse and thin, and girls with dark eyes. She loved that look. I was thin, but that’s because I was doing shows, working really hard. At that time I was staying at a B&B in Milan, and you’d get home from work and there was no food. You’d get to work in the morning, there was no food. Nobody took you out for lunch when I started. Carla Bruni took me out for lunch once. She was really nice. Otherwise, you don’t get fed.”