Bring Me The Horizon lead singer Oli Sykes and his wife, Brazilian model Alissa Salls, lived with monks in Brazil for a month after experiencing depression during the pandemic last year. He told The Sun‘s Bizarre column that it was a form of spiritual “rehab.”
Sykes said, “For a while I just went into a very dark place, a place that I’ve been in before, but it was the start of a beautiful thing finding myself again. I think everyone experienced some level of this during lockdown . . . It was depression for me, for sure, but that worst kind of depression where it’s not like you’re feeling sad but where you’re feeling nothing at all. You’re really just out of touch with your own emotions.”
Sykes went to rehab in 2014 for Ketamine addiction. He likened his stay with the monks to that saying, “It was like a rehab to be honest. I went to rehab a few years ago for drugs. But when I came here it was a detox, but from everything . . . emotional issues, dependency on devices, dependency on being a musician. I just learned how to be still and wake up and think I’ve got nothing to do today and that’s absolutely fine.”
Sykes said he and his wife woke up at five each morning and lived for that month without any electronic devices.