says that he's affected daily by “chemical depression”, but that he has no interest in speaking to “fucking doctors” about it. In a new [paywalled] interview with newspaper, 's legendary leader admits “When I first wake up I’m suicidal, actually suicidal”, and that it takes him about 30 minutes to shake off his darkest thoughts, aided by some self-prescribed and commonly available mood enhancers. “I have a couple of cups of tea, two digestive biscuits - apparently equal to 17 sugar lumps - and I feel happy,” he tells journalist Emily Prescott.
“If I start my journals before I have my cup of tea, I’ll paint a very bleak picture of my life. Despite the fact that I have everything that I want and everything that I need..
. And I have had a really extraordinary life.” Townshend goes on to reveal that he had therapy for three years in the 1980s, but ended up sacking his therapist.
“After the third year, I realised that the woman counselling me had only said about three words. I was just listening to myself,” he says of the experience. “So now I just write journals.
Every morning I rebuild myself in a sense with tea and coffee, and a few vitamin pills.” Away from The Who, Townshend recently helped stage a one-off musical performance of , a collaboration with his wife Rachel Fuller based upon Hermann Hesse’s 1922 novel, , at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London. Townshend first read in his twenties, during a period when he studied teachings about s.
