Soap Vet Rick Springfield Opens Up About Suicide

Last week, famed rocker and General Hospital alumni Rick Springfield confessed to considering suicide last year and it wasn’t his first attempt.

According to an interview on Sirius XM’s Feedback, the 68-year-old star who played Dr. Noah Drake on General Hospital in the early ’80s and again in the 2000s (with his last appearance in 2013), said his depression took a dark turn in 2017.

“Last year, I was close to it,” he said.

In fact, his new album is entitled Suicide Manifesto, and it’s been more than 50 years since the actor and singer made his first suicide attempt via hanging, which he miraculously survived.

“You’re in so much pain that you just want to end it,” Springfield said in the Sirius interview. “I have been there and I know what it’s like and I understand. It’s just part of your makeup.”

While Springfield admits, he has taken medication for his bouts of depression, for him meditation works better.

Depression and thoughts of suicide is a constant battle for the actor, and although he thought having kids would change things for good, it didn’t.

“When I had kids I said, ‘OK that takes suicide off the table, that’s not an option anymore, I don’t care how bad I feel.” But now my kids are grown,’ he told the Sirius show. “It’s really weird…it would devastate them. I don’t know how I could ever come to terms with that. But it rides on my shoulder every day.”

Still, Springfield is hard at work on his music and promoting his new album, and you can see him talk about his music in the video below.

You can also hear him discuss his dark times in his distant and recent past tomorrow on Good Morning America.