Geoff Rickly of Thursday talks to The Ties That Bind Us about recovering from addiction:

Until he got clean in 2016, shortly before Thursday returned after a five-year hiatus, Rickly spent the last several years of his addiction trying desperately to salvage his personal life while putting on a professional front that still managed to move forward. He joined No Devotion, a Welsh alternative bound formed from the ashes of Lostprophets, in 2014 and signed the band to his Collect Records label. Whatever success he enjoyed, however, was eclipsed by the growing realization that his drug problem was slowly consuming everything.

“The last few years of using heroin, of course I wanted to stop, but it was literally impossible,” he said. “They tell you (in recovery) to take it a day at a time, and I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to make it another 10 minutes. What are you talking about?’ It was so hard to imagine having to be without the thing that made me feel like a person, because unless I got really high, I didn’t really feel connected to people. If I wasn’t high, every sensation, every thought, was another expression of unbearable pain. Spiritually, I was so empty.”

Parker Molloy talked with Geoff Rickly of Thursday about how mental health issues in the arts needs to be talked about more:

“I think mental health is still a source of great shame for most people,” Rickly adds. “Implying that there is anything wrong with their mind is still often considered an insult. For artists, I think there’s a sense that we don’t have much (money, material success) but the one beautiful thing that we get as an artist is a state of mind, a high level of imagination and a lot of time to explore it. If you devalue that, by saying our thinking is sick, it takes away from the one thing we have of any value. Or it can feel that way.”