Legendary Queen guitarist Brian May has opened up on his mental health admitting it "becomes very dark" if he doesn't keep busy. The 77-year-old dad of three has been open about his battle with depression in the past and he confessed he still struggles to stop himself from slipping back into it. "I've done quite a lot of therapy. I'm not doing therapy at the moment. I keep busy. Keeping busy is my therapy. Now I know that may not be the healthiest kind of therapy," he acknowledged.
"In fact, the therapy I went to one of the mantras (was): 'Are you a human being or a human doing?' You know, to be a human being, you have to be not that busy and still be okay with yourself. I don't really have that talent. I do need to be busy, or I...tend to fall to pieces. I start asking myself too many questions, and it all becomes very, very dark. I don't like myself and stuff," said.
"I get busy, and I make little achievements. I make a nice little piece of music, I do a nice interview with somebody nice, and I think, 'Oh, my day was alright'," he told the Fret Not podcast in 2023.
Brian has been very frank aout his struggles in the past and admitted he suffered from such severe depression in the early 1990s.
A series of losses and trauma, beginning with the death of his father at the age of 66 in 1991 swiftly followed by bandmate Freddie Mercury's death at the age of 45 on November 24 that same year, triggered the reaction, which led to him "nearly driving off Hammersmith Bridge".
“It’s like you’re paralysed. I found I couldn’t see colour. There was no colour in the world, literally. Even music didn’t get to me in the worst moments. Depression would clamp down like a fog. Black fog," he recalled.
"I have great strength, a strong optimistic side, but because I didn’t really deal with the loss, I was carrying this low-grade depression for a long time. And much later, when I came to the complete crisis, I’d lost my mum too,” he told the Mirror in 2002.
He further expanded on this period of his life in a 2021 chat with The Independent. “I was mostly very, very depressed and despondent, losing too much at one time. Losing Freddie, apparently losing the group, losing my marriage, apparently losing my children, losing my dad, it was a big catalogue of loss.
The stuff with my kids was the worst, feeling that I was losing them. Divorces normally get very messy and very resentful and a lot of times I was fighting to be able to see my kids. That to me was a club I didn’t want to be in and I couldn’t handle it…
"Something really caved in in my brain... I’d never sought professional help. I just wallowed around in it and tried to solve it in my own ways. I ended up nearly driving off Hammersmith Bridge a lot of times. I couldn’t cope,” he said.
Brian has sine been able to cope with the grief and went on to marry his second wife Anita Dobson.
