accurate depictions of mental disorders in music

[olivesmarch4th]

The other day, ''Brian Wilson'' by Barenaked Ladies came on the radio. I'm always struck by how accurately that song depicts depression without glorifying it.

I know there is a bunch of teenybopper shit out there that puts a glamorous spin on being depressed and usually totally misses the mark.

I've always felt that Green Day's song ''Longview'' deserves the ultimate award for Best Depiction of What It's Like To Be Depressed. That whole song is one giant nasty opus to living with depression.

Originally Posted by Longview

Sit around and watch the tube,but nothing's on
Change the channels for an hour or two
Twiddle my thumbs just for a bit
I'm sick of all the same old shit
In a house with unlocked doors
And I'm fucking lazy

Rest of lyrics here.

What songs do you know that depict mental illness accurately?

If that's too narrow a topic, what songs do you know that depict typically glorified/misunderstood things accurately?

[Panurge]

Many outsider musicians have made songs that accurately depicts (or illustrates) mental illness. Daniel Johnston is one of the most well-known.
If you don't mind wading through a bit of spoken word and other oddities you will find many examples of great portrayals of mental illness in ubuweb's project 365.

[Manwich]

Yeah Daniel Johnson for sure.

Similarly, the late Wesley Willis had chronic schizophrenia and his song Chronic Schizophrenia is presumably pretty accurate. He had a lot more songs about his mental illness as well as other topics like bestiality, Kirk Cobain and riding buses.

Riding in the streets with no music sucks
Everywhere I go, I cruise the streets being called an asshole
Plus I'm being ridiculed and called a bum and called stupid

Chronic Schizophrenia lyrics

[minlokwat]

Steely Dan’s Don’t Take Me Alive traces the steps of a lone-nut gunman trekking up to the watch tower to pick off the innocent standers-by.
Becker and Fagen present their guy as deeply troubled rather than a raving lunatic. The second stanza, from memory:

Can you hear the evil crowd?
The lies and the laughter.
I hear my inside.
The mechanized hum of another world.
Where no sun is shining.
No red light flashing.
Here in my darkness,
I know what I’ve done,
I know all at once who I am.

The fact that the song’s intro kicks in with a ripping guitar solo makes a great song that much better. I’d provide a sound link but can’t from work. Frickin’ management always wanting employees to be productive. One of these days I tell you…

[Argent Towers]

Wow, I never thought I'd see someone cite that song (one of my favorites) in any context at all. Excellent call!

I would say Pink Floyd's music captures the alienation, confusion and fear of mental illness or drug addiction pretty masterfully.

[Drain Bead]

I always thought Bright Eyes covered depression with a side of self-medication very well. "Something Vague" is probably the best example.

[jjimm]

Black-eyed Dog (ignore the irrelevant video) by Nick Drake is the most powerfully musical, and lyrically minimalist, depiction of depression I have ever heard. Written like had got to the end of everything, and there was nowhere else to go. He was only 26 when he recorded it, and he killed himself a few months later.

[Random Design]

Six degrees of inner turbulence by Dream Theater. Musically and lyrically quite a presentation.

[Gyrate]

I've never been psychotic but I've sort of figured it was like this: Psychosis Safari by The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster

I’ve got my limbs tied up and a blindfold across my eyes
A feelin’ I know that I’m gonna have to tell a lie
My hearts in my mouth, but my minds in a furry cup
A feeling you know that I’m dreaming, I can’t wake up

[MrDibble]

Joy Division - songs like Digital, Something Must Break, Dead Souls, Insight cover depression quite well.

[An Arky]

"It was one morning when I woke up, and then I found out that they'd
signed some papers, and then I was...I was gonna be kept in a bed... owing to the state of me mind. And then I found out that the uh...that the authorities had said, um, that I'd gotta' ave special food fed to me for me thoughts... um, and I think it's
because... well, because I was going off my...

Heaaaaaaaad....."

From The Move's Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited

[Busy Scissors]

Bonnie Prince Billy's 'I see a darkness' album as a whole is the best I've heard at describing depression, as well as being one of the best albums I've heard full stop. Dealing with depression would be a better way of putting it, as a lot of the songs are uplifting. So whilst the sonic range of the album is rather narrow, the emotional range is magestic. Tracks like 'Today was another day full of dread', 'Death to everyone' and the title track are just outstanding examples of dealing with the dark thoughts.

[Small Hen]

Originally Posted by Random Design

Six degrees of inner turbulence by Dream Theater. Musically and lyrically quite a presentation.

I also love their take on panic attacks in...um...Panic Attack. One of my favorite songs to sing on Rock Band.

[BomTek]

Originally Posted by Random Design

Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence by Dream Theater. Musically and lyrically quite a presentation.

Came in here to say this.

I also like, although it's not precisely what the OP asked for (it fits the wider category asked for at the end of the post better), the song "Paradise" from The Rising, the album Bruce Springsteen wrote (mostly) after and in response to 9/11. It's haunting. It describes a suicide bombing from the point of view of the bomber. He/she has lost a significant other, apparently in the 9/11 attacks or some other terrorist attack, and is looking to get revenge and meet the departed on the other side. It's pretty amazing.

[ultrafilter]

Black Sabbath's "Paranoid" is a pretty accurate view of depression as well.

[NDP]

YMMV but I think The Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" gives the listener a pretty good idea of what being bi-polar (or manic-depressive) is like.

[Mister Rik]

MC Frontalot - "You've Got Asperger's":

You got Asperger’s, this ain’t a barbecue.
It’s your whole afternoon though, lost down a rabbit hole,
looking for a timepiece, wonder when your date’s at,
wonder if she’ll visit you at all today — relax.
Wonder how many ribbons to expect in her hair —
to deflect talk of triplets in respect for the pair
or to stare at the bow made of four different colors —
didn’t notice someone talking to you: there were others
in the room, out in the gloom of the periphery.
To shift your focus for a moment is to give the ribbons liberty,
and that’s to suggest they make escape.
This is a secret from the future: can’t rewind like a tape.
Got to make the best and the most of each moment as it happens,
got to keep your eyes on those bows, got to trap in
your vision all four of them ‘cause this is a first:
she might have noticed last time that you like ribbons that are hers.

Full lyrics

[nyctea scandiaca]

Fade to Black by Metallica is a good look at a person so depressed he is contemplating suicide...

Life, it seems, will fade away
Drifting further every day
Getting lost within myself
Nothing matters, no one else

I have lost the will to live
Simply nothing more to give
There is nothing more for me
Need the end to set me free

Things not what they used to be
Missing one inside of me
Deathly lost, this can't be real
Can't stand this hell I feel

Emptiness is filling me
To the point of agony
Growing darkness taking dawn
I was me, but now he's gone

No one but me can save myself, but it's too late
Now I can't think, think why I should even try

Yesterday seems as though it never existed
Death greets me warm, now I will just say goodbye

[Robot Arm]

As a baby in my mother's arms
She would croon and I'd see pink
And when she'd bathe me in the sink
The radio would play red or green or lavender
When the Beatles sing it's a yellow thing
Yeah, the Stones are always purple
Every melody that I hear
Fills my mind with colors bright and beautiful

SYNAESTHESIA
If everyone could see the things that I hear
SYNAESTHESIA
A giant box of Crayolas in my ear
...

I'd never heard of synaesthesia before hearing that song. Not sure how accurate it is, but I found it posted (with permission) on a page with other synaesthesia resources.

[ToeJam]

The best Drug description song for me was the song "Celebration of the Lizard" by The Doors

Just... so vivid and the way he sings the various poems. It's mindblowingly cool.


The snake was pale gold
Glazed and shrunken
We were afraid to touch it
The sheets were hot dead prisons
And she was beside me
Old, she's no, young
Her dark red hair
the white soft skin

Now, run to the mirror in the bathroom
Look!

[Sampiro]

Kurt Vonnegut said his absolute favorite song about a low key depressive episode is Counting Flowers on the Wall. I completely agree; whoever wrote that song has been there. (Just looked it up: it was written by Lew Dewitt, who sang tenor for the group and suffered depression largely due to major health problems; he died of Crohn's Disease at 52.)

[ZipperJJ]

I've always found Psycho Killer interesting.

Say something once, why say it again?

We are vain and we are blind
I hate people who are not polite.

[Talon Karrde]

Chris Bell suffered depression for all his life, and the lyrics to most of his solo songs reflect this. I know from personal experience that they reflect the way someone in the midst of depression thinks. When I was lonely in college I listened to him a lot because he expressed a lot of what I was feeling.

I'll go over some of Chris Bell's songs as examples.

olivesmarch4th, if you read the lyrics to any of these or listen to them on YouTube I'm interested to know what you think. Some people think his lyrics are too self-pitying, and I can see where they're coming from, but IMO self-pity and recognizing it and hating yourself for it and feeling even more sorry for yourself as a result is what happens to deeply depressed people.

I Am the Cosmos is about... well, actually I don't entirely get it. I think it's about feeling powerless.

My feeling's always have been something I couldn't hide,
I can't confide,
Don't know what's going on inside,
So every night I tell myself
"I am the cosmos, I am the wind"
But that don't get you back again

YouTube link

Better Save Yourself begins with him out on the streets alone, trying and unable to come up with an explanation for why he's been cast out. The next stanza is one of his most blunt:

I know you're mine
He treats you nice
It's suicide
I know, I tried it twice

And then it gets to the chorus, where he combines religious guilt with self-anger at how he feels and blaming himself.

The next song, Speed of Sound is a mixture of hope and despair. It opens with "I remember the first time you said you loved me" but then immediately follows with "I waited all weekend, you never called me". Later in the song he describes his existence as "lonely" and calls it a lie. Then he ends the song singing about a plane being unable to land because the pilot is dead, so it crashes.
YouTube link

Despite having mostly positive lyrics, Look Up is possibly the most devastating song of his, partly because of his tortured vocals. It sounds like he's desperately yearning for them to be true as much as believing in them. In the middle of the song he watches someone walking by who wants to give up, and then says:

Standing here at the corner
I'm watching him walk away
I'm Standing here and I don't know why
But I'm thinking it could be a great day

It's pretty obvious that the other person is himself. Seeing his different moods as different people is something I've experienced too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1N7bggECdw

There Was A Light is similar to Look Up in the mixture of hope and despair. Musically it reminds me of Let It Be. It doesn't have many lyrics, and the few it has are all great. I especially love the last line of the opening stanza

There was a light,
So dear to me,
I wanted to live

Wow.

[olivesmarch4th]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

Kurt Vonnegut said his absolute favorite song about a low key depressive episode is Counting Flowers on the Wall. I completely agree; whoever wrote that song has been there. (Just looked it up: it was written by Lew Dewitt, who sang tenor for the group and suffered depression largely due to major health problems; he died of Crohn's Disease at 52.)

Oh, absolutely. Country music is particularly good for songs about depression. And drinking. And drinking while depressed.

Originally Posted by ToeJam

The best Drug description song for me was the song "Celebration of the Lizard" by The Doors

Just... so vivid and the way he sings the various poems. It's mindblowingly cool.


The snake was pale gold
Glazed and shrunken
We were afraid to touch it
The sheets were hot dead prisons
And she was beside me
Old, she's no, young
Her dark red hair
the white soft skin

Now, run to the mirror in the bathroom
Look!

That is some really interesting imagery. This is cool! I haven't heard of a lot of these songs.

I just thought of some more:
Gin Blossoms' New Miserable Experience, pretty much the entire album. It's depressing as hell, but it's also a masterpiece.

Originally Posted by Lost Horizons

The last horizons I can see
Are filled with bars and factories
And in them all we fight to stay awake
I'll drink enough of anything
To make this world look new again
Drunk, drunk, drunk in the gardens and the graves

I guess the songwriter/guitarist killed himself about a year after the album was released. I can't say I'm surprised.

I also think Chevelle's ''Family System'' is one of the best songs ever written about family dysfunction. It totally skips the narrative and makes you feel like you're smack in the middle of the conflict.

I'm tired of your open mouth
Crawling inside my skin
Endless pain we never quit...

Forget the time I said I would,
Replace that with I never will,
Beyond the facts held in your face,
Ignore the facts beyond your nose... etc.

And then the best part is they break in the middle of the song and scream, ''JUST GROW UUUUUUPPP!!!''

Exactly.

[olivesmarch4th]

Originally Posted by Talon Karrde

olivesmarch4th, if you read the lyrics to any of these or listen to them on YouTube I'm interested to know what you think. Some people think his lyrics are too self-pitying, and I can see where they're coming from, but IMO self-pity and recognizing it and hating yourself for it and feeling even more sorry for yourself as a result is what happens to deeply depressed people.

I think the lyrics definitely reflect a deep despair. I actually relate the most to ''I am the cosmos,'' I think it's the same message as ''Everything Zen'' by Bush (or at least, how I interpret it)... trying to find a spiritual center in the midst of chaos or suffering and knowing it's really not going to happen.

I agree that hating yourself for your feelings makes depression worse. Self-pity may have a useful function. As a person who is chronically depressed I have learned that the sooner I accept it as a part of my life, the less I suffer. It's comforting to listen to these songs, it's validating to know others have gone through it too. Without question.

[independentminded]

Originally Posted by NDP

YMMV but I think The Who's "Behind Blue Eyes" gives the listener a pretty good idea of what being bi-polar (or manic-depressive) is like.

Good point, NDP. Right on!!

[rivulus]

How about Benjamin Britten's operas? Peter Grimes or The Turn of the Screw. Or Alban Berg's Wozzeck. Some serious craziness there, that is pretty well explored in the text and music. Then there are the various bel canto "mad scenes" -- usually of sopranos going batty. I don't find those quite as convincing because the style does get clichéd over time. Nevertheless, some people find them to be fairly accurate musical depictions.

[xnylder]

Matchbox 20's Unwell describes depression:

All day
Staring at the ceiling
Making friends with shadows on my wall
All night
Hearing voices telling me
That I should get some sleep
Because tomorrow might be good for something

That last line breaks my heart.