Rick Springfield Details Teenage Suicide Attempt

Rick Springfield has opened up about his attempted suicide when he was a teenager.

In a conversation with SiriusXM’s Eddie Trunk, Springfield – who described himself as a “real loner” – noted that he suffered from undiagnosed depression in his youth.

“I was dealing with a lot of stuff in my head,” the rocker confessed. “I hated school. It always felt like prison to me and I wasn’t in the clique. I was never in the clique. I was always kind of the outlier guy. And it just got to me. I was feeling bad about myself. I really had a lot of dark thoughts about myself at that point.”

One day, the darkness felt so unbearable that Springfield attempted to end his life.

“I tried to hang myself when I was 16,” he admitted. “There was nobody [at his home]. My parents were working and I was, at that point I was staying away from school. I had wasn’t very successful at school and that was the only arena, you know, a kid could be successful. And if you weren’t into sports or anything like that, I was playing guitar, but nobody kind of really cared about that at school. So I was just miserable.”

When Springfield’s attempt at suicide failed, he hid the evidence from his family.

“I had a rope burn around my neck for like three weeks and wore a turtleneck so that no one could see,” he explained, adding that he “just went to school the next day” as if nothing had happened.

Springfield further revealed that his mother had no idea about the suicide attempt until he wrote about it in his 2010 memoir.

“She denied it. She couldn’t believe it,” he recalled. “She thought I made it up for the book. So it was kept very, nobody knew about it.”

Rick Springfield Says Suicide Attempt Has ‘Been With Me Ever Since’

Springfield has been open about his mental health issues, admitting that its something he continues to manage today.

“Somewhere in the back of my head I thought, maybe there’s a reason that [the suicide attempt] wasn’t successful,” he explained. “But it’s been with me ever since. I’ve been close to it again.”

The singer also expressed exasperation towards people who suggest his successful career should guarantee happiness.

“[Depression has] nothing to do with how successful you are, it’s all to do with what goes on inside and I’m managing it,” the “Jessie’s Girl” rocker declared. “And I write when I get down, I write, sometimes it’ll just hit me and I won’t know why, and other times there’ll be a reason. And, I only talk about it because it frees me a little bit to talk about it and I think it frees other people to a degree. I’ve had a fairly okay life and I haven’t collapsed from it.”