Free Mikey Way’s Nipple 2k22

“People would see me onstage standing still and think that I was just the dude that chills in the back,” he later explains between wolfish bites of a spicy tuna roll. “Little did they know I was having crippling anxiety attacks onstage.” It started as a nagging self-doubt — about his musical ability, about his role in the band — but during the late 2005 headlining tour it ballooned out of control. “Here I was, I finally had everything I’d struggled for my whole life, and it wasn’t fun anymore. I was standing on the stage looking out, not enjoying it at all.” Mikey stitched himself together with drinks and pills during the writing of The Black Parade — and sought solace in the company of his new fiancée, Alicia Simmons — but inside it was worsening. “It was too much stimulus at once,” he says. “I never had a chance to come to grips with anything — my grandmother dying, my father having a [non-fatal] heart attack on our tour bus. I was a complete mess.” The band’s choice of accommodations in Los Angeles didn’t help matters. “Take a manic-depressive kid and throw him in a haunted house — with no cell-phone service, no TV, no heat — and put him in a room with one glowing blue light.” Mikey’s hands actually begin to shake at the memory of it. “I got there immediately and was like, ‘I know I’m not going to make it through this, I just wonder how it’s going to end.’” Mikey found himself desperate to escape, zoning out of practices and bursting into tears in front of the group. After an intervention from Stacy Fass — My Chemical Romance’s attorney and unofficial band mom — Mikey left the house to seek treatment. Living with Fass, he saw a parade of psychologists — four times a week — and was relieved to find that his condition had a name, and that there was medication that could alleviate his depression. (Mikey describes his diagnosis as “very close to bipolar”; in the middle of dinner he swallows a rainbow-colored cocktail of pills that he says work “for now.”)”