Credit: Tyler ShieldsOn Badflower's single "Ghost" and the band's upcoming debut album OK, I'm Sick, frontman Josh Katz sings frankly and honestly about his struggles with mental health, including depression, panic disorder and suicidal thoughts. The positive reaction to his music has Katz encouraged about the conversation surrounding those issues, but he also warns about the danger of "romanticizing" artists dealing with them.
"You have to not romanticize the idea that you're this artist or that there are these artists that are these larger-than-life people," Katz tells ABC Radio. "They're not -- they're just people, and they have feelings and they have emotions."
When you romanticize mental health issues, Katz says, you can fall into the dangerous narrative that an artist who dies by suicide "died for their art" or was "too good for this world."
"As a fan, when you're so detached from an artist, you could maybe think that, 'Oh, they died for their art, it's such a special thing,'" he says. "But in reality that was just a human being who had family and friends and people who cared about them, and that was a terrible, terrible thing that happened, that shouldn't happen to anybody."
Katz admits that he's fallen into that line of thinking before -- "Especially when I was younger," he says -- but as he's grown up and become an artist himself, he "do[es] [his] best not to think that now."
"I just try to stay as humble as possible," Katz says. "And no matter how much success our band has, I can't slip into that mindset, because it's toxic."
OK, I'm Sick arrives this Friday.
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