Watch Leonard Cohen open up about his depression: “A general sense of confusion”
Leonard Cohen‘s songs were always characterised by a profound and vulnerable confrontation of the darker recesses of his mind. Like many of the most emotionally sensitive artists, Cohen had suffered from a deep depression. In the 1990s, he began five years of seclusion at the Mt. Baldy Zen Centre near Los Angeles and was eventually ordained as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk in 1996.
“I don’t think anybody gets into this kind of activity unless their personal level of distress reaches a certain unendurable point,” Cohen said, discussing his anguish. “To be serious about. Nobody gets into a very rigorous activity unless they’re suffering.” Cohen then noted that personally, depression was just one thing, but he had been suffering from “just a general sense of confusion, bewilderment, a sense of shipwreck, that you’ve screwed up badly.”
He added: “I feel like I’m coming out of the closet, but depression has certainly been an element that I’ve had to deal with all through my life. You know, my cover story looked wonderful. ‘The guy’s doing OK; what’s he got to complain about?’ You know, nobody dealt me any bad cards.”
However, Cohen insistent that it was not just him that had to deal with his mental malaise: “I think it goes with the territory everybody’s got something that they gotta deal with that’s rough. What happened was that somewhere along the line, I understood that this question had to be addressed on the fundamental level of consciousness.”
The interviewer noted that many of Cohen’s songs are somewhat depressing and certainly self-reflective in nature. She asked whether Cohen felt that if he dealt with his depression if he “got better”, he would “lose touch” with his artistic side. However, Cohen was adamant that that would not be the case.
“No,” he simply said. “That’s a popular notion that it is exclusively suffering that produces good work or insightful work, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think in a certain sense it’s a trigger or a lever, but I think that good work is produced in spite of suffering and as a victory over suffering.”
Cohen concluded: “If the level or degree or intensity of anybody’s distress or disorder is sufficiently high, you can’t move. For people who have experienced acute clinical depression, the problem is getting to the next moment. The room tilts, you lose your balance, and you’re incapable of coherent thought. I’ve been there.”
