Paul McCartney has revealed that The Beatles each may have struggled with their mental health, but they didn’t discuss it.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, McCartney explained that he and his bandmates were more likely to write about how they felt than talk about it.
When asked if The Beatles had experienced mental health issues, he said: “Yes, I think so. But you talked about it through your songs.”
“You know, John would. ‘Help! I need somebody,’ he wrote. And I thought, ‘Well, it’s just a song,’ but it turned out to be a cry for help,” he said.
McCartney went on to explain that each of them “went through periods when [they] weren’t as happy as [they] should be.”
“Same kind of thing happened with me, mainly after the break-up of the band,” he said.
He continued: “Ringo had a major drinking problem. Now he’s Mr Sober of the Year! But you know there were a lot of things we had to work through, but you’re right — you didn’t talk about mental health.”
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Despite the revelation, McCartney said the group were all “reasonably well adjusted” to their fame.
“It was something really that, as four guys, you were more likely to make fun of than be serious about. And the making fun of it was to hide from it,” he said.
“But having said all that, we were reasonably well adjusted, I think.”
In other news, McCartney recently praised upcoming Beatles documentary Get Back for confirming to him that he wasn’t at fault for the band’s split.
“It proves that my main memory of the Beatles was the joy and the skill,” he said.
“The proof is the footage. I bought into the dark side of the Beatles breaking up and thought, ‘Oh God, I’m to blame.’ I knew I wasn’t, but it’s easy when the climate is that way to start thinking so.”
Check out ‘Here Comes the Sun’ by The Beatles:
