Bruce Springsteen admits he is ‘crushed’ by depression

Bruce Springsteen has revealed his battle with clinical depression, for which he began seeking help in the early 1980s.

Bruce Springsteen has revealed the extent of his clinical depression. Picture: AFP.

He is about to finish the most lucrative rock tour of the year, playing with a band that includes his wife and some of his best friends in front of adoring fans, many of whom have seen him in concert dozens of times since the 1970s. He closes the set each night with a joyful, self-mocking declaration: “You’ve just seen the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, house-rocking, earth-quaking, booty-shaking, Viagra-taking, love-making, legendary E Street Band!”

Anyone would think that Bruce Springsteen, 66, was a man at ease with himself. However, in his new autobiography, Born To Run, the singer reveals the extent of his battle with clinical depression, for which he began seeking help from a psychotherapist in the early 1980s.

The 500-page memoir was written without a ghostwriter over seven years. It will be published on September 27 by Simon & Schuster. Springsteen has spoken about his struggles with mental illness but never with such frankness.

“I was crushed between [the ages of] 60 and 62, good for a year and out again from 63 to 64,” he writes. “Not a good record.”

He recorded his acclaimed 2012 album Wrecking Ball at one of his lowest points without his band mates realising the state he was in, although he acknowledges that the song This Depression might have raised their suspicions.

Only Patti Scialfa, his wife of 25 years and backing singer, fully understands. When his depression takes hold, “Patti will observe a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerine and running quickly out of track”, Springsteen writes. At which point, “she gets me to the doctors and says, ‘This man needs a pill’”.

In the book Springsteen traces his depression to his blue-collar New Jersey childhood and his tense relationship with his hard-drinking labourer father, Doug, who came from an Irish-American family bursting with undiagnosed or undiscussed mental illnesses.

He calls touring his “trustiest form of self-medication”. The band members have had health problems but Jon Landau, Springsteen’s manager, said that they never talked about retiring.

The Times