“Long you live and high you’ll fly, and smiles you’ll give, tears you’ll cry and all you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be”
― Pink Floyd
The beauty of art resides in its ability to shapeshift into any form. Paintings, movies, literature, and music exist in order to portray the vastness of emotions a person can feel. Roger Waters explored various forms of art to create The Wall, a conceptual album that became one of the most representative works of the band and the twentieth century. The central topic of both the album and the movie revolve around one subject: Depression.
Like any of the 350 million people who suffer from this disorder, Waters struggled with it for years. The character from the movie resembles Waters himself. A series of tragic events, like the extravagant rock & roll lifestyle and the memories of his dead father, led him into a spiral of depression that put his life at risk. The character finds himself absorbed in thought, and the pain derived from his memories takes the form of a wall. The wall is undoubtedly symbolic of how depression prevents a person from thinking objectively.
Waters’s conceptual work excels at addressing a taboo subject, and it is also a majestic piece of visual art. On the other hand, Roger Waters is not the only celebrity who has fought the ghost of depression. Many musicians, actors and directors have swum in these treacherous waters. These brave men overcame their depression with the help of their family, art, therapy, and/or medication.
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Woody Allen
This famous director has multiple times addressed in his movies the symptoms and the outcomes of depression and anxiety, because he has experimented them himself. In order to fight his demons, he continues making films. He finds comfort in his profession. He writes, acts, directs, and edits as a form of therapy.
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Hideaki Anno
Hideaki Anno, creator of Evangelion uses his work to portray depression. In fact, his anime invites its viewers to never lose hope. The main character echoes the feelings of despair and loneliness that often submerge people in a spiral of self-loathing. Nevertheless, he eventually discovers that in human connections a light at the end of the tunnel can be found.
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Jim Carrey
We often describe comedians as the funniest people in the world. We can’t conceive them in a context of loneliness or sadness, because they are the people who make us laugh the most. As a successful comedian, Jim Carrey has struggled with depression most of his life. The actor took Prozac to reduce the symptoms of this disorder, and he eventually overcame it. “I was on Prozac for a long time. It may have helped me out of a jam for a little bit, but people stay on it forever. I had to get off at a certain point because I realized that, you know, everything’s just OK,” he stated in an interview for 60 Minutes in 2004.
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Bruce Springsteen
Springsteen recently wrote an autobiography where he describes his experience with depression. The memories of his father, who he depicts as a character ripped from the pages of any Bukowski’s book, triggered his disorder and affected the relationship with his wife on the long term.
“You don’t know the illness’s parameters,” he said. “Can I get sick enough to where I become a lot more like my father than I thought I might?” He commented in a interview with Vanity Fair, regarding his upcoming book Born to Run.
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Eric Clapton
Clapton never met his father and was raised by his grandparents. When his first son was born, he understood for the first time the bond between a father-son relationship. Nevertheless, the boy died at an early age in 1991, after he fell from a 53th floor in New York. Clapton was devastated, up to the point where he even experimented with drugs to ease his pain. In April 23, 2016 Clapton posted on Facebook that he snapped out of his depression with the help of fellow musician Prince and his film Purple Rain. “In the middle of my depression, and the dreadful state of the music culture at that time it gave me hope, he was like a light in the darkness,” he shared. Nowadays he has remain sober and happy.
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Ray Charles
Ray Charles saw his brother die when they were playing. Afterwards, he lost his sight, and years later, his mother. He found refuge in cocaine and heroin, but his pain never went away. His drug problems, which derived from depression, ended affecting his health and relationships. He agreed to go to rehab and stayed sober until his passing in 2004.
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Rivers Cuomo
Weezer’s front man struggled with severe depression after his album Pikerton was a commercial failure. He also felt disappointed with the music industry, and as a student in Harvard he was unappreciated. All of these factors influenced him to take a step back from the music business. “I was just there by myself. I painted the walls and ceiling black and covered all my windows so that no light came in. And I rested. By the end of any day, I’d start to have some of the darkest thoughts and fears and feelings,” he confessed in an interview in 2010. After this dark period, he slowly began to see the light and gradually left the past behind him. “The struggle is not over, often, the thought will flash through my head onstage, ‘I’m not doing a good enough job.’ But I’m much closer to making peace with it all,” he declared in a Rolling Stone interview.
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Eminem
Marshall Mathers III had a neurotic, drug-addicted mother, and his father abandoned him from an early age. The death of a close friend and a writer’s block was the final straw that triggered his depression. He fought against it with more drugs until he realized he was spiraling down. “It was the worst time of my life. It just gave me a real legitimate excuse, in my head at least, to use drugs. I didn’t care if my drug problem got worse at that point so I took more pills,” he opened up in an interview for The Guardian in 2009. The rapper sobered up and used music and the love for his child to keep him busy and focused. “Honestly, I’m not really angry at anything right now. I’m OK with my life and what’s going on right now,” he shared. Nowadays, he is considered to be a legend in the music industry.
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Gerard Way
At the age of 24 he created My Chemical Romance alongside his brother Mikey. Way already had a history with depression, alcoholism, and consumption of prescriptive pills. His songs and lyrics addressed his darkest days. To Gerard, music is an escape to keep him away from his bad habits.
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Johnny Depp
Depp constantly suffers from social anxiety attacks. In order to avoid triggers, he rarely does interviews and talk shows; he doesn’t even watch his own movies. Johnny is aware of his conditions and regularly goes to therapy to deal with anxiety and prevent the depression that derives from it. “People cry, not because they’re weak. It’s because they’ve been strong for too long.” — Johnny Depp
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Depression is a mood disorder, where the person who lives with it usually feels exhausted, sad, and frequently loses interest in performing daily activities. It can affect anyone, regardless of gender, age and social status. These celebrities invite us to raise awareness about this topic and treat it seriously. They also encourage us to look for help and treatment to overcome it.
