Bruce Springsteen opens up about his mental health issues

In a new interview, rock legend Bruce Springsteen, who has previously discussed the depression he has suffered for decades, has expanded on his own mental health issues.

"I have come close enough to [mental illness] where I know I am not completely well myself," the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, 69, says in an interview with Esquire magazine. "I've had to deal with a lot of it over the years, and I'm on a variety of medications that keep me on an even keel; otherwise I can swing rather dramatically and . . . just . . . the wheels can come off a little bit. So we have to watch, in our family. I have to watch my kids, and I've been lucky there. It ran in my family going way before my dad,” who was diagnosed as schizophrenic before his death in 1998.

"I once felt bad enough to say, 'I don't know if I can live like this.' It was like … " Springsteen says, his voice trailing off then picking up again. "I once got into some sort of box where I couldn't figure my way out and where the feelings were so overwhelmingly uncomfortable."

He explains: "This was the 'agitated depression' I talk about in" his 2016 memoir, "Born to Run," "where feelings became so overwhelmingly uncomfortable that I simply couldn't find a 12-by-12 piece of the floor to stand on, where I could feel a sense of peace on . . . I had no inner peace whatsoever. And I said, 'Gee, I really don't know. I don't know how long I could. …' It was a manic state, and it was just so profoundly emotionally and spiritually and physically uncomfortable that the only thing I've ever said was, 'Gee, I don't know, man.' "

Saying he was now unsure if this "very bad spell" was "a couple weeks? Was it a month? Was it longer?" Springsteen calls it a result of "DNA. And it came out of the roots that I came out of, particularly on my father's side, where I had to cop to the fact that I also had things inside me that could lead me to pretty bad places."

Calling his public persona "a creation," Springsteen concludes: "At the end of the day, identity is a construct we build to make ourselves feel at ease and at peace and reasonably stable in the world. But being is not a construct. Being is just being. In being, there's a whole variety of wild and untamed things that remain in us. You bump into those in the night, and you can scare yourself."