The Music Industry Needs To Address The Ways It Fails Artists When It Comes To Mental Health

On the 17th of May, 2017, Chris Cornell died of depression in Chicago, Illinois.

Is this unexpected? Yes. Is it a shock? Hardly.

It is only in recent years that we have been able to track the lives of those who have existed within the sphere of popular music and measure the impacts of the vocation on their life expectancy.

Multiple studies across the Western world point to an overwhelming conclusion: that music, as a profession, involves navigating a high-risk environment that has major outcomes on the health, wellbeing and life expectancy of those that are involved.

The numbers laid out are sobering:

• Musicians have an average life expectancy of 57 years, a number that plummets even lower depending on the genre of music you play and the country you live in.
• A significantly higher propensity for developing anxiety, depression and suicide ideation up to five times above national averages.
• Chronic poverty: in Australia alone, 80% of all musicians live below minimum wage.

Despite these numbers, there is a suspicion that occurs when someone like Cornell dies: "I thought he’d worked his depression out? He had it all — money, a family, recognition and lived his dreams; why choose to kill yourself?"

To many people suffering from chronic mental illness, what looks ideal from a distance is recognised internally as a period of respite in a lifelong game of Snakes & Ladders.

Cornell is an example of how career musicians (and other creatives and support professionals) have deep struggles in achieving a stable pathway through life the way most of society recognises it.

While there are likely to be no exact answers for his situation, when you examine the makeup of those drawn to a life in music and the environment they find themselves in, there are some strong clues.

The very notion of high creativity means those with the ability to produce music at a high level have a very different experience of reality than most.

Although many people comfortably accommodate linear thinking, living within routine and timelines, creatives possess what can be thought of as a wide-bandwidth lens through which they perceive the world around them. They are wide open to sound, texture, colour, language, humour, spatial relativity, vibrancy, rhythm and especially the nuances of emotion and human interaction.

When directed productively, this provides a connective tissue for their art and the pathway magnetising their audience. However, another side is drawn out when they become overwhelmed by that sensitivity and find themselves unable to cope. One artist I know defined it as having a brain that feels like a browser with 1000 tabs open, all blinking at you.

It’s this group of people who are drawn towards vocations that allow these skills to flourish, who often find huge support and encouragement in the communities and camaraderie that surrounds them. They find their people; they find their place in the world.

While there is little doubt that playing music is a healthy pursuit, being within the music industry is not necessarily so. When music becomes a livelihood, you are required to deliver an ongoing exploration of personal and emotional vulnerability at a commercial scale.

Most musicians can access this — the brightest talents excel at it — but if an artist is chronically depressed or clinical and remains under pressure to produce songs or perpetually tour in that state, it can lead to writers' block, self-medication and personal and emotional shutdown, especially if someone requires the catharsis of exploring their creative side to work out their emotions or help balance the problems in their lives.

In the book Living With A Creative Mind, authors Jeff and Julie Crabtree put forward the concept of the 'Nine Dimensions Of The Creative Mind' to encapsulate a baseline for how artists can operate to achieve good habits and sustain themselves.

It outlines the way creatives need to go to extremes in order to operate effectively and how maintaining good work output and health long-term is achieved by moving oppositional aspects of their lives in direct proportion from each other to achieve this — ballast as opposed to balance.

As such, artists need regular and consistent times of recovery and reflection in order to stay vibrant creatively and heal from the demands of their work — something many professional musicians and their teams either fail to put in place or recognize the need for until it is too late.

Working within the expectations of the industry and audience often leaves little room to operate like this, especially since the mythology that surrounds the ‘tortured artist’ and public displays of self-destruction can often drive media attention and define the apparent ‘legitimacy’ of being a professional musician to the public.

Add to this the fundamental demands of touring — an environment that can be filled with chronic isolation, criticism, conflict and dynamic financial pressures — it’s no surprise that it can render a normally sensitive person not only inert but leave them feeling as if there is literally no sanctuary anywhere.

But is it accurate to blame the pressures and strains artists experience as purely being a product of the music business?

My take is that, since the peak revenue of 2002, the music industry (at least in Australia) has sufficiently devolved to the point where it is no longer a haven for opportunists looking to exploit artists on every level — rather, it is a collection of small-to-medium enterprises that, if successful, tend to consist of conscientious music people who set out to do the very best for their charges.

I believe the core issue that people working in the industry face is that they’re not trained to recognise the difference between pushing someone to the best of their abilities vs. pushing them over the edge.

We, as a music community, need to rethink how we too often allow fragile people to remain stuck unassisted in the hamster wheel of music as an outcome of our collective drive to get ahead and improve the odds for our acts.

Likewise, artists need to examine their own expectations of what it is to be involved in building a career for themselves. They need to recognise their own risk profile and the truth behind the culture and mythology that can drive people to develop lifelong habits that are terminally unsustainable — sometimes it’s OK to just play music instead of trying to build a living at it.

If that means artists and their teams have to avoid opportunities in the face of market pressures, ambition and the possible financial and social rewards of doing so, then so be it — we cannot continue to exploit talent at such a high personal cost without seriously considering the possible outcomes first.

Lastly, it’s not good enough for us as a community to give small regard to acquiring the skills necessary to perceive these problems and provide appropriate first response to members in our community that are potentially in crisis. With these kinds of statistics, it’s our humanitarian duty to get training and context for the business we are all in and have a clear understanding of the effects and outcomes on the resilient, the vulnerable and the fragile among us.

As a result of Cornell’s passing and the bringing to light of these statistics, I hope there will be robust discussions on how we as industry can work to change the trajectory for artists and their teams moving forward. I hope that, in addition, we can all move towards abandoning our desires around wanting others to destroy themselves for the sake of our entertainment.

I believe acknowledging the need for good mental health and removing the shame and stigma behind being vulnerable to mental illness will ultimately produce better artists who make better music for longer.

If you're a member of the music industry in need of interim health or financial assistance, Support Act is a registered charity established for exactly that purpose. Contact them on 1300 731 303 or see their website for more information.

If you or someone you know is in need of crisis support or suicide prevention assistance, please contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or talk to one of their available crisis support staff. See their website for further details.