Sting & Depression: What Gordon Sumner Has Actually Said

Sting appears on almost every list of famous people with bipolar disorder on the internet, including, for many years, ours. So it is worth being direct about something at the top of this article: Gordon Sumner has never said he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

What he has talked about, repeatedly and thoughtfully, is depression — long periods of it, at the height of his fame — and a temperament he himself calls melancholic. That is a real and interesting story, and it does not need to be inflated into a diagnosis he has not claimed.

Wallsend

Gordon Sumner was born in October 1951 in Wallsend on Tyneside, in the shadow of the Swan Hunter shipyard — he has described watching ships being launched at the end of his street. His father was a milkman and later an engineer; Sumner did the milk round with him as a boy.

He has written with unusual candour about the emotional distance in that household, and about how little was said between him and his parents. He did not attend either of their funerals, a decision he later described as a mistake and one he examined at length in his memoir Broken Music.

He worked as a schoolteacher before music paid, playing jazz in Newcastle clubs at night. A yellow-and-black striped jumper earned him the nickname that replaced his name entirely.

The Police, and the Cost of Winning

The Police formed in 1977 and, across five albums ending with Synchronicity in 1983, became the biggest band in the world. Then they stopped, at the peak, amid the well-documented friction between Sting, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers.

Sting's solo career, beginning with The Dream of the Blue Turtles in 1985, was immediately successful and has continued for four decades across seventeen Grammy Awards.

It is the period around and after that transition that he has described as genuinely dark. His first marriage ended; his mother and then his father died within a short span; and he was, by his own account, working continuously and feeling almost nothing.

What He Has Said About Depression

Sting has returned to this subject in interviews over many years, and a few themes recur.

The first is a sustained period of depression during which he could not write. He has described a stretch of years in which songs simply would not come, and the accompanying fear that the ability had left permanently — a fear he has said was worse than the sadness itself. The album The Soul Cages in 1991, written largely about his father and the shipyards of his childhood, was the work that broke the block, and he has described making it as a form of grieving he had not done at the time.

The second is his description of his own baseline temperament as melancholic — a natural pull towards sadness that he regards as bound up with why he writes at all. He has spoken about this without romanticising it and without treating it as an illness.

The third is what he does about it. He has talked for decades about yoga, meditation and physical discipline as central to his stability, and has been notably unenthusiastic about the idea that suffering is required for art.

So Is Sting Bipolar?

There is no evidence for it, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Sting has never reported a bipolar diagnosis, has never described the elevated or manic phases that define the condition, and has not spoken about mood stabilising medication or psychiatric treatment. What he has described — extended low periods with clear precipitating events, alongside a stable, extraordinarily productive working life across fifty years — is not the same thing.

Depression and bipolar disorder are distinct conditions. Depression alone, however severe, is not bipolar disorder; bipolar disorder requires episodes of mania or hypomania. Blurring the two is one of the most common errors in popular writing about mental health, and it does a disservice to people with both conditions — not least because the treatments differ, and antidepressants given without a mood stabiliser can destabilise someone who actually has bipolar disorder.

We keep this page because Sting is so widely and wrongly listed, and a reader searching for the answer deserves to find an accurate one.

Legacy

Fifty years in, Sting remains one of the most decorated musicians alive, and the songwriting — harmonically restless, lyrically literary, rhythmically indebted to reggae and jazz in ways rock rarely was — has aged remarkably well.

His contribution to the subject of this website is a quieter one. He has spoken honestly about a period of years when he could not work and could not feel much, and he has consistently rejected the idea that the pain was the point. For a musician of his stature to say that publicly is genuinely useful, and it is worth more than his inclusion on a diagnosis list he never belonged on.

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