Matt Schultz of Cage the Elephant has opened up about the mental issues he had that led to him getting arrested in New York City in 2023. Cage the Elephant has a new album coming out this Friday, and they are in Denver at Red Rocks on September 18th.
Schultz told Rolling Stone that he started a prolonged psychosis in 2020 due to some medications he’d been taking. And in that time he:
- He separated from his wife in 2021 because he thought leaving her would protect her from him and his delusions. (The couple remarried in 2023.)
- He’d carry notepads with him to jot down his thoughts, in case he found a “clue” on something he perceived someone had done to him.
- He also took Polaroids of his bedroom. “I’d clean my room immaculately and put everything in a perfect place,” Shultz explains. “And then I’d take a Polaroid of it and store it away to see if I came back and noticed that somebody moved something. It’s really odd to look at those now because they’re just a bunch of Polaroids of a perfectly clean room, but at the time, that was my security.”
Schultz added the arrest for gun possession in New York saved his life. He explains, “Sometimes in life you need a powerful attention-grabber, and that definitely grabbed my attention. As soon as I was arrested, I was immediately checked into the hospital. Those two months were a time period of starting to have good reality testing again, where I was starting to understand what the real world actually was.”