Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz has a mental health illness, depersonalization disorder.
Duritz first disclosed his diagnosis publicly in 2008 and asserted that his mental health issues have hampered his ability to write new songs and release new music with Counting Crows.
Dissociative disorders are conditions that involve disruptions or breakdowns of memory, awareness, identity, or perception.
Some dissociative disorders are triggered by psychological trauma, but depersonalization disorder is a dissociative disorder that causes sufferers to feel as though they are outside observers of themselves, disconnected from their physical bodies and no longer in control of their thoughts and actions.
In a 2015 interview with Clture, Duritz said, “I have a dissociative disorder which sometimes makes the world seem like it’s not real,”. “There’s rarely anything I find more lonely than realizing that nothing is real. You’re as isolated as you can possibly be at that point.”
“When I was younger, and it first started happening, it would lay me out,” he added. “It was beyond terrifying. As an adult, terror is not a big part of your life. It is when you’re a kid– you have nightmares and things you don’t know aren’t real. But as an adult facing terror is hard. But you live with something long enough you learn to adjust to it,” Duritz revealed.