In a recent TalkShopLive interview, legendary BLACK SABBATH bassist Geezer Butler discussed his past struggles with depression.
“Unless you’ve experienced true depression, you can’t describe it,” Butler said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). “It’s like you’re going to this awful black hole. 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. So the only way I could express myself was writing the lyrics for [BLACK SABBATH‘s classic song] ‘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 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 about his current well-being, Geezer responded: “Good now, yeah. ‘Cause in 1999, I was finally properly diagnosed, and they put me on Prozac for six weeks. And the doctor says, ‘It’s not gonna work straight away. Keep taking it for six weeks and eventually you’ll start feeling like normal again.’ And I said, ‘Well, what’s normal?’ After six weeks, this big cloud seemed to lift off me. It was great.”
Last August, Butler talked about his struggles with depression in an interview with NPR‘s “Bullseye With Jesse Thorn”.
He said at the time: “Well, I wasn’t depressed all the time. Just the occasional bout would come on me. At first, when it was getting really bad… Back then nobody ever said anything about depression or anything like that, and people were terrified to mention that you might be depressed ’cause you automatically thought you were gonna be taken away to a mental hospital and be locked away forever. So you couldn’t talk about it to people in case that happened.
“One day I got a really bad bout of depression and I went to the doctor and he said, ‘Oh, go down the pub and have a couple of pints. Or take the dog for a walk or something. You’ll be all right.’ And it was, like, ‘No, I’m not gonna be all right. It doesn’t work like that.’ And that kept happening. And it wasn’t until, I think in the 1990s. I was living in St. Louis at the time, and I had a bit of a nervous breakdown. And I went to this doctor, the usual doctor, and I just explained everything to him and he told me that I was clinically depressed and he put me on Prozac. And after six weeks, I finally came out of the depression. And I thought, ‘Oh, yeah. This is what I’m supposed to feel like.’ And ever since that, I’ve been okay.”
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