Pete Townshend, the Who guitarist, has said that despite struggling with crippling “chemical depression”, he would much rather write in a journal than pay for a 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 said of his psychotherapy experience. “So now I just write journals. Every morning I rebuild myself in a sense with tea and coffee, and a few vitamin pills.”
The 79-year-old says he still wakes up every day and wants to die — he just doesn’t talk to “f***ing doctors” about it. He got rid of his therapist in the early 1980s after three years.
Townshend, who lives in Ashdown House — a 17th-century country