Jimmy Barnes has opened up about the darkest moment of his life, revealing he once attempted suicide in a hotel room while his wife slept beside him.
Speaking in his new Channel Seven documentary, Working Class Man, the singer, 69, says he had hit a low point in his battle with alcohol during a 2012 trip to Auckland, New Zealand.
After drinking the entire contents of the hotel minibar and taking sleeping pills, he wanted to end his life.
His wife Jane, 67, was only metres away when he was overwhelmed by despair.
“(I thought) Jane would be better off without me. I am gonna leave,” Barnes said of his thought process.
“I couldn’t get any lower emotionally, spiritually. I was just f***ed,” he added, explaining how he was “pouring alcohol and pills” down his throat “in a haze.”
“I think about ending it. Never having to face myself again,” he said.
Barnes blacked out and later woke to find the sash from his robe tied around the clothing rail inside the wardrobe, “where I must have left it.”
He said he had been “waiting to die” but either “luck or fate” intervened that night.
“And it was like, holy s**t. But I didn’t die. (I decided) something’s got to change. This is it, something’s got to go,” he said.
The terrifying moment led him to seek help from a psychiatrist, where he confronted the trauma of his violent upbringing.
“I was sort of being smothered and suffocated by memories of bad things. I tried to lay bare all the stuff from my childhood,” he said.
Barnes has long spoken publicly about his battles with addiction and mental health.
He previously recalled a traumatic encounter with a man who had taken his own life in a car park in 1984. The memory haunted him for decades and became one of the reasons he spiralled into suicidal thoughts himself.
Barnes described sitting with the dying man for an hour, waiting for help to arrive. “I remember I was downstairs for an hour sitting with him, waiting for an ambulance to come. I didn’t want to leave him alone in this pool of blood,” the Cold Chisel frontman said.
“I just sat there with him thinking ‘How could you do this? Why did you do this?’ It was a bit of me talking to myself in a way.”
Moments earlier, he had been standing on his own balcony battling thoughts of taking his own life. It was also not the first time he had come close.
Jimmy added that after the death of AC/DC icon Bon Scott in 1980, he found himself drinking a bottle of vodka on the cliffs at The Gap in Sydney.
“I had to move away because it started to be enticing, you know, thinking of a way out,” he added.
Barnes and his wife Jane, who married in 1981, have built their life together while he has fought his demons. He believes the suicide attempt was a “subconscious thing” after years of trauma and addiction.
The singer is urging others to speak up and seek help when they are struggling.
If you or anyone you know needs immediate support, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or via lifeline.org.au
Images: Instagram
