Personal Experiences of Mental Ill-health in the Music Industry

Head First, the inaugural conference on mental health and wellbeing in the Australian music industry, took place in Sydney this week. It was a beautiful thing to see professionals from diverse backgrounds share ideas about how to make the industry a more mentally healthy workplace. The need for psychologists who understand what it’s like to work in music was highlighted more than once throughout the day. Professionally, this is a spur for me to continue developing my practice in therapeutic alliance with people who work in the music industry. Yet since the conference, I’ve also found myself reflecting on personal struggles I had while working as a songwriter/performer in the early 2000’s (when mental health literacy in the music industry was non-existent). What follows is a description of those struggles, how I might make sense of them as a psychologist, and what might have helped me address them at the time. Though necessarily personal, my hope is that sharing these experiences will contribute to the broader conversation around mental health and wellbeing in the music industry.

“Andrew’s in his office again.”

Before I began touring as a musician in my early 20’s, I had taken three trips that required air travel: once when I was 7 years old, twice when I was 19. Airports and planes had rarely featured in my life. When I got the itinerary for the first real tour I ever went on, there was something unsettling about seeing months of shows and flights packed tightly against one another. I blocked those feelings out, because I was also excited. On tour though, it didn’t take long for the unsettled feeling to return. I got so nervous before flights that I’d stop on the way to the airport to go to the toilet, go again before boarding the plane, again before landing, and again before leaving the airport. This happened so frequently that a colleague began to joke, “Andrew’s in his office again,” each time I went to the toilet. Eventually this spiralled to its natural peak: a panic attack while riding an 18-seater airplane to a show in a rural centre in South Australia. It felt like the tiny aircraft shook mightily with the faintest gust of wind. My eyes were shut tight through the whole flight, and I literally kissed the dusty red ground when we landed. Neither I nor anyone else in my network at the time had the language to notice and name this as anxiety. I thought some part of me was faulty, so I didn’t talk about it. What I needed was information and support: This is anxiety. Everyone experiences it sometimes. Your particular experience involves fear of flying, and that’s pretty common. Would you like some help learning how to manage your flight anxiety, so that you can feel more present and connected with the reason you’re flying? Instead, I grinned and bore it. This did not serve me well.

“Anxiety makes you depressed”

Anxiety and depression love to hang out together, but the nature and dynamics of their relationship vary from person to person. I once heard a psychiatrist sum up a version of the relationship thus, “Anxiety makes you depressed.” That was true for me, as the daily slog on tour of putting up with anxiety while putting on a mask of wellbeing became exhausting. After a while, it started to grind down my mood. I felt trapped in 24 hour cycles of: flight anxiety, hotel check-in, boredom, hopelessness, lunch, more boredom, more hopelessness, sound check, loneliness, dinner, pre-performance anxiety, euphoria of performance, la bonne fatigue post-performance (quickly buried by partying etc.), and insomnia. Then repeat, starting with a 6am flight. This had a snowballing effect: because I always felt tired, often felt bored, and increasingly felt hopeless, I spent most of my downtime on tour in bed. I wasn’t sleeping, though. Mostly I was ruminating. “It’s always going to be like this… Why am I like this? There’s no point exploring the city I’m in, I don’t have enough time… Why do I have to do all of this traveling? Why can’t I just teleport onto the stage from home?” When the thing you love that used to be exciting and fulfilling becomes routinely anxiety provoking, it can be depressing. Again, I probably needed some information and support. When we’re depressed, it feels like we have to withdraw from the world until we feel better. But the very things that might help us feel better are the things we’re withdrawing from. It’s possible to do things that you know are helpful (e.g., exercise, cutting down on partying, contact with friends/family, getting out and visiting new places), even when your mind is telling you there’s no point. Learning how to manage depressive thoughts and implement some of these lifestyle changes would have probably made a positive difference to how I handled life on tour. But there were also less obvious aspects to being a musician that negatively impacted my mental health.

“You’re way better looking on TV”

When I got to the makeup and styling area for the second music video I ever featured in, the security guard didn’t believe I was an artist and wouldn’t let me in. He got pretty grouchy when I persisted, shouting and swearing at me. Eventually the director came and smoothed things over, which prompted an immediate, stomach-churning change in demeanour from the security guard. I brushed it off in the moment, but I felt embarrassed and angry. I stewed on it for days. “But I am an artist – do I not seem like an artist? Do I need to be more of an artist? What does that mean? How should I dress and talk and walk and behave – how should I be?”’ That was the first in an accumulation of interpersonal sequences that started to feel like an interrogation of my personhood. After an in-store performance and signing, a teenage girl walked up to me and said, “You’re way better looking on TV,” and then walked away. At a single launch, a well-known industry figure got a bit handsy and then called me ‘sullen’ when I told him to take his hands off me. When I got my first big royalty payment, a well-meaning family member said music was my, “High paying hobby,” knowing that it was my sole occupation and source of income at the time. I could go on (and on). This all happened around 2004 when Facebook was brand new, before YouTube, Twitter and TikTok existed. I can only imagine what turbocharged version of the above today’s artists are experiencing. In subtly different ways, each of these interactions sent me the same message. “Be warned: ‘you’ – as a person who happens to be a musician – are a contested concept.” What I needed was some space and time to work out healthy ways to carry this musician part of me. I needed strategies to cope with the inevitable painful moments, and to learn that I can put my heart and soul into music behaviours without getting tangled up in a persona that’s imposed on those behaviours. Basically, I needed a therapist.

Each concept contains it’s opposite

We are psychologically large enough to have seemingly incompatible experiences coexist within us. A common expression of this in therapy is that, “I’m a whole, valid person just as I am, and I need to make some changes.” The above recount of challenging experiences in the music industry does not negate my love for song writing and performing. Working as a musician I experienced anxiety, depression, crises of self, and had some of the most fulfilling, transcendent moments of my life. For a long time, that was assumed to be the lot of a working musician. There is a growing movement in the music industry which rejects that assumption, and asserts that pursuing a career in music need not come at the expense of one’s mental health and wellbeing. At the forefront of this movement in Australia are professionals in the fields of music and mental health, including organisations like Support Act. I don’t know if I would have connected with this movement, or attended a conference like Head First, in my early 20’s when I was working in the music industry. I probably would’ve told myself that I didn’t need to; that these issues weren’t applicable to me. That’s partly why I started my own practice – to offer the type of psychological support to today’s music professionals that I didn’t recognise I needed when I was working in that industry.