As more details emerge of the tragic suicide of Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, his very last interview has shed some light on the problems the singer was dealing with.
The interview focuses on Chester’s mental health and his battle with depression, as well as the complexity of the illness.
The father-of-six, who was found dead at his home on Thursday, had openly spoke about his turbulent past in regards to substance abuse and mental health.
In what’s believed to have been his last interview, the 41-year-old frontman talked about death and how he valiantly battled on during his darkest hours.
During the interview, which has been obtained by Mirror Online, Chester said:
I came to a point in my life where I was like, ‘I can either just give up and fucking die or I can fucking fight for what I want’, and I chose to fight for what I wanted.
I wanted to have good relationships, I wanted to love the people in my life, I wanted to enjoy my job.
I wanted to enjoy being a dad and having friends and just getting up in the morning, because that was a struggle for me.
Before the release of the band’s latest LP, ‘One More Light’, the star revealed in May how the album had helped him to come out of the ‘darkest time’ of his life.
He also revealed that that album was a very ‘personal’ piece of work which had been ‘very therapeutic’ for Linkin Park to write.
Chester said:
I’m just going to focus on what’s going on right now and make the best of the situation no matter what it is – I’m not going to question it or analyse it in any way because that’s me going back to my old behaviour where I was trying to control everything.
He continued:
We got into a lot of aspects of our lives that we probably wouldn’t have normally shared with anyone and just dealt with it on our own.
We brought in various issues and situations into the writing process.
When you hear it in the context of the music there’s a hopefulness and there’s a sense of moving forward and moving on and that’s really where we’re coming from.
Chester added that entering therapy had also helped him with his personal struggles:
It was all really things I could work on if I chose to, and make myself happy, you know?
Make myself capable of dealing with life on life’s terms, like it’s not always going to be peaches and cream but it doesn’t always have to suck when it’s not.
For me it took a lot of work, it actually took me opening up and talking to my friends about it and writing about it, and like going to therapy and battling my demons.
Tragically, months later, Chester was found dead at a private residence in Palos Verdes Estates in Los Angeles, at about 9 a.m. on Thursday morning.
Police responded to a call of a dead body in a house, which law enforcement officials confirmed was the rock star’s home.
Tributes have poured in for the late-singer, from band mates and those across the music industry, including Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst and Rihanna.
Chester was a father to six children and had been married to his partner Talinda – his second wife – for eleven years.
If any of these issues have affected you, please don’t suffer in silence. Call Samaritans on their free 24-hour hotline on 116 123.
