Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler opens up about past battle with “true depression”
nme.comBlack Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler has opened up about his past battle with depression, saying that you “can’t describe it”.The musician spoke about his mental health struggles during a recent interview with TalkShopLive.“Unless you’ve experienced true depression, you can’t describe it.
It’s like you’re going to this awful black hole,” Butler explained (via Blabbermouth).“And people would say, like, ‘Oh, just go and have a drink or take the dog for a walk.’ That’s what the doctors used to say. ‘Well, go and watch television or read a book.’ And, of course, you’ve got no interest in anything.”He continued: “So the only way I could express myself was writing the lyrics for [Black Sabbath’s] ‘Paranoid’.
I mean, I wasn’t depressed all the time, but when I used to get the bouts of depression, you just couldn’t explain it to anyone, and you were terrified that you [would] go to a mental health person, maybe, and they put you in hospital for years, in a mental institution.“So you’d never go to doctors or anything like that.
And so you just had to get on with it. And the only way I could get it out of my system was to write the lyrics.”When asked how his mental health is currently, Butler responded: “Good now, yeah. ‘Cause in 1999, I was finally properly diagnosed, and they put me on Prozac for six weeks.
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