Whoopi Goldberg reveals she stopped her mother from taking her own life

Whoopi Goldberg has told how she stopped her mother from taking her own life when she was just eight years old.

The View host has recalled how she came home from school one day to find her mother looking "dishevelled" while "muttering incoherently".

"I watched as she went over to the oven, turned it on, and put her head in there. I was old enough to know this was really bad news. I ran over and grabbed her around the waist and pulled her out," she writes in her new memoir, Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, And Me.

She wrote that she felt "protective and p**sed off" as neighbours watched her mum being put into an ambulance and driven away.

The 68-year-old told her co-hosts on The View that once her mother was taken to hospital, she didn't see her for two years.

"Our cousin, Arlene, she took care of us, and my dad showed up and he took care of us, but in those days kids were told nothing, parents just disappeared, things happened," Whoopi said. "And for me it was really kind of like, 'Oh, so they've taken her to this hospital and no one's going to tell me anything and I can't go see her.'"

She added, "They gave her electroshock treatments (that were approved by) my mother's father, my grandfather, and my dad okayed it. They okayed that my mother get the shock treatment for two years."

Whoopi's mum, Emma Johnson, died in 2010 after suffering a stroke, and her brother Clyde, who is also talked about in her book, died in 2015 from a brain aneurysm.