With the deaths of Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, suicide and mental health issues have become major topics of discussion in the rock industry. The Killers frontman Brandon Flowers opened up for the first time about his wife Tana’s struggles with PTSD and suicidal thoughts in a new Q magazine interview. Below is an excerpt of Flowers talking about his wife’s issues. If you are dealing with mental health issues, you can call the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255, or enter their live chat.
“It’s been…wild,” he says, searching for the right adjective. “It’s been horrible.”
In 2013, Flowers’ wife Tana gave an interview to the website Mormon Women in which she alluded to an abusive family upbringing and her issues with anxiety and depression. “It’s medical and I have the symptoms,” she admitted. Flowers says he always suspected there was “something lurking” in his wife. “But it didn’t manifest itself completely til she was around 30.” Tana was eventually diagnosed with an extreme form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), known as Complex PTSD from other forms is that it involves multiple traumatic events,” he elaborates. “It’s not just one thing that triggers it. There are so many things that have happened to her. I didn’t understand it before. And no way would we have made it without her getting help.”
Tana’s condition finally became critical in August 2015, the month Flowers was touring his second solo album, The Desired Effect, when he suddenly cancelled the last six American dates. The official explanation was “due to unforeseen circumstances.”
“I cancelled that tour,” he now reveals, “because she got to a point – this is really hard for me to even say the words – but she was having suicidal thoughts. That was as bad as it got.”
