The latest in our series of articles we’ve shared in which public figures openly discuss their mental health issues is the excerpt below from The Guardian’s interview with singer Neko Case. Case, like other public figures who have shared their personal struggles with various mental illnesses, may help alleviate the stigmas attached to mental illness by doing so. We always appreciate having these people acknowledge that money, fame, privilege and power are not magical barriers against the tougher aspects of the human experience. If you’re in Northeastern Ohio and you recognize yourself or someone you love in Neko Case’s story, we hope you’ll reach out.
Case is 42 now, with eight albums to her credit as well as her work as a member of the Canadian group New Pornographers. She has been Grammy-nominated, critically feted, profiled in the New Yorker. Her last album, 2009’s Middle Cyclone, debuted at No 3 on the US Billboard chart. She is famed as a storyteller, her songs drawing on dreams and fables, on her love and fascination for the animal kingdom. She is noted, too, as a great interpreter of song, having covered tracks by Tom Waits, Loretta Lynn and Hank Williams, among others. And she is known for her voice: a lusty, unleashed thing by times, at others a lorn, spare call that brings to her songs a kind of wild sadness.
This afternoon, she pads through the house in sweatpants and a hoodie with a tiger on its back. It was here on the farm that, a couple of years ago, Case began work on her eighth album, The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You. It’s an uncharacteristically personal collection of songs that document a particularly bleak period in Case’s life.
“I was going through really a hard time and pretty depressed,” she says. “Just grieving. Lost a lot of family and stuff. It hadn’t happened all at once, but I had never really slowed down to grieve. And I kind of took it in a farming way, you know, like ‘They’re dead. Gotta keep going.'” She says this with a shrug in her voice. “But you really do as a human being have to slow down and take it in and look it in the face. And I had avoided it for so long that my body basically said, ‘Guess what? I’m just going to make you super-depressed now, because you have to deal with this stuff and transmute it or whatever you’re supposed to do with it. Or you’re gonna be really f***ed up.'”
There was no sudden descent, more a steady slide to the bottom. “Just a gradual, ‘I can’t shake this, I can’t shake this … what is this?'” she explains. “Just super-unhappy and acting out here and there, just not being myself.” But it was the mundanity that struck her more than anything. “Depression, there’s no grand excellence to it,” she says. “In my experience it was just almost the gulaggy boringness of it that’ll kill you. You’re just in this murk. And you’re with other humans, but you lose all your human skills and it’s just like you’re in this plastic bag and you can’t quite connect with people. You lose your ability to transmit electricity or something, and to receive it. It’s just like this ‘bzzzuh’.” She makes a feeble, disconnected sound. “It isn’t sparking.”