Brad Pitt reveals how he spent years with ‘low-grade depression’: ‘I think joy’s been a newer discovery’

Brad Pitt is speaking out about his mental health and revealed how he spent years in a “low-grade depression”.

The 58-year-old actor opened up about feeling lonely during an interview with GQ for its July/August issue and confessed that he didn’t start to truly “embrace” the people in his life until recently.

“I always felt very alone in my life,” he said. “Alone growing up as a kid, alone even out here, and it’s really not till recently that I have had a greater embrace of my friends and family.”

“What’s that line, it was either Rilke or Einstein, believe it or not, but it was something about when you can walk with the paradox, when you carry real pain and real joy simultaneously, this is maturity, this is growth,” he added.

However, he also shared the ways in which he felt so much “joy” in his life, which included music.

According to Pitt, through that “joy,” he’s been able to “embrace” all aspects about himself and his past, including his struggles with “low-grade depression”.

“I think joy’s been a newer discovery, later in life. I was always moving with the currents, drifting in a way, and onto the next,” he said. “I think I spent years with a low-grade depression, and it’s not until coming to terms with that, trying to embrace all sides of self—the beauty and the ugly—that I’ve been able to catch those moments of joy.”

Pitt also revealed one challenge he’s faced in his sleep, detailing how he had previously encountered a constant and violent nightmare.

In an email exchange to GQ, he had the “most predominant dream” that he’d ever experienced, “for a solid four or five years,” was where he’d be “getting jumped and stabbed”.

“It would always be at night, in the dark, and I would be walking down a sidewalk in a park or along a boardwalk and as I’d pass under an Exorcist-like street lamp, someone would jump out of the abyss and stab me in the ribs,” the Flight Club star explained.

He went on to recall that in the dream, he would get “followed” and then “flanked” by someone, which made him realise that he was “trapped” by people who want to cause “grave harm”.

Pitt also described a different occurrence in his nightmare, as he’d get “chased through a house” while trying to help a kid “escape,” before getting stabbed.

And although some parts of his dream didn’t stay the same each night, he said that the one thing that constantly happened in each of them was him getting stabbed. However, he noted that he had no idea why that hallucination in his sleep kept happening.

“Always stabbed. And I would awake in a terror,” he wrote. “I didn’t understand why it/they would want to hurt me. This stopped a year or two ago only when I started going straight back into the dream and asking simply why?”