Gary Lightbody, the lead singer with Irish rockers Snow Patrol, has spoken up about being so low that he had to fight a "lifetime" of feelings of "not wanting to be here".
The Belfast singer-songwriter, who revealed that he hasn't had a drink in two years now, described having feelings of "self-hatred" that he overcame, during the band's time out of the spotlight.
“The thing I realise about depression now that I didn’t really properly understand before is: you don’t get through it on your own," he said.
He told the BBC that he decided to quit boozing two years ago, after hitting the bottle too hard for the previous five years, during which he'd ben out of the limelight.
"Stopping drinking, that was very hard for me, it was a crutch, I didn't have to think about anything when I was drunk," he admitted.
"I didn't do any rehab but I did what Irish people find very difficult to do and I found very difficult to do and I saw a therapist, who was very helpful."
He added: "I've had acupuncture for many years now and I'm a big believer in it as well. My acupuncturist in LA is the most amazing person and friend of mine, who more than anyone I think helped me out of it. She also taught me how to meditate.
"My family were aware [of my drinking] but I don't think my mum knew the extent of it until I stopped and was maybe a year after stopping when I could be honest with her that I was drinking every day.
"I was hiding it from them in a way. I was 5,000 miles away from them for the most part, so they didn't see my day-to-day – but they were pretty shocked.
"The last time I was on tour, I didn't drink that much because my voice would go when I drank, so when I was on tour I wasn't too bad – but it was when I was off tour, and again (it's been) seven years since the last album, so pretty much five of those were spent drinking solidly.
"Going back on tour doesn't really frighten me that much because I know what it costs; it costs me not being able to sing and probably the one thing I hate more than anything that I have control of, is not doing a show – we've cancelled so few shows in nearly a 25 year career, and anytime it does (happen) it smarts, I can't handle it – so people don't need to worry about that, the show will definitely go on."
In an interview with The Telegraph, Gary also said: “Winston Churchill had a great name for depression: his black dog. And I think that was probably it – it was just an animal of some sort that just lived with me… and that frightened me.
“Now I understand you have to put your arm around it. The only way to conquer a fear is to face it, and make friends with it, because then it doesn’t have any power over you.”
He spoke about cutting out all drugs and alcohol on his road to recovery.
He added: "The only way to conquer your fear is to face it."
In an interview with the BBC, Gary spoke candidly about his battle with booze: "[The new album] comes from quite a lot of kind of heavy soul searching, like depression that I've suffered with from I was a kid, I never really spoke about that before, my father's dementia – he's had dementia for a few years now – my alcoholism and that I am sober now for two years, and am able to speak about it with clarity and with hope.
"These things are not just open-ended in a way where they feel like it's kind of a lost cause. I'm actually talking about these things in a way I've tried to deal with them positively, and hopefully people can hear that in the record."
He said that he's battled with depression since his teenage years.
"When it hits me it takes so much, and I'm sure that's the same with everyone and people are incapacitated. I mean friends of mine who I've spoken about it with have had similar experiences, like nothing make sense and there is no light and trying to write in that place is extremely difficult: you have to kind of get out of that place before you can write about it," Gary said.
"The only thing that worked for me in the end was reaching out to people; plenty of people reached out to me to try and find me in my darkness, bless their hearts for doing that, it means a lot to me now – but at the time I felt hurried, I wanted to stay in the place I was in."
Gary also told the BBC: "But it's not something that's every day, it comes and goes and if I'm busy I'm not in that place, but I've had a lot of time, it took seven years to make the album so you can do the math yourself: there was a lot of time that was spent on my own and in that time you just fall down that hole.
"I think when I got to my lowest I realised I didn't want to go any further and I think sometimes you have to get to your lowest, where your ground is and then you have to climb out. So then it was really reaching out to friends – and they helped pull me out of it.
"I had people to turn to. Not everyone has that, I'm very lucky."