It's weird to rock out about mental health. (Incidentally that comp ^ is designed to get you to do that, and it benefits the National Alliance on Mental Illness, so buy it.)
It's not that there's not precedent — there's "Nervous Breakdown," "Psycho" and about a million variations on that theme — it's just that it's not necessarily "fun," and garage rock is "supposed" to be fun. Arguments about whether or not people can or should discount whole bands or songs because they're not living up to some kind of arbitrary definition of "fun" aside, why is it complicated to write a song that explicitly discusses mental illness?
"Toss and turn all night / fidget through the day
Blacking out the blues / till everything turns gray"
Anxiety's not sexy. It lacks the gravitas of depression or the "exotic" qualities of your more severe personality disorders, and it's such a generalized term that celebrities have started "coming forward" about their "struggles with anxiety" the way they might have used to about, I don't know, sex addiction or kleptomania or what have you. (Honestly, if Kourtney Kardashian is living with anxiety, cool; I'm sorry, that sucks, Kourt. But I don't believe you.) Feeling agitated or upset about your life is just part of being a human; true and chronic anxiety is pervasive, amorphous and — at least in my experience — acutely, physically painful. But it's hard to drum up sympathy or even understanding when the reductive definition of your disease is "I'm worried."
"Closing up my chest / I'm hanging up a sign
This space is for rent / brother, can you spare a dime?"
Anxiety, like that Abilify commercial where depression is an anthropomorphic bathrobe, hangs over you and clouds your perception. For me, it meant (means) being 100% convinced at all times that something was (is) terrible, and if I didn't (don't) know what it was (is), I had better damn sure find out. More often than not, that meant inventing something, or many things. (This is a list of common cognitive distortions; disentangling myself from them is a daily process.) Articulating anxiety is difficult; for me it's a jumble of nervousness, irritation, anger, existential dread and a basic, ground-floor ennui or weltschmerz. Physically, when it's near the top end of the 1-10 scale, anxiety manifests as an actual pain in my chest, a shrinking, closing, cannot-catch-breath sensation, and, on the more whimsical side, near-constant fidgeting.
"I can't catch my breath / my mind is racing
I just need a rest / from this fucking thing
Please leave me alone /I didn't ask for this
There's a fuse blown / the wires spark and hiss"
It's an irritating and unfair double standard that we'll accept garage rock describing mental illness in amorphous and generic terms ("I'm crazy/psycho/having a nervous breakdown"), but there's some arbitrary tipping point where it stops being "fun" and starts being a drag. My line in the sand is honesty; I will bum you out with my songs if I have to, because the songs that mean the most to me are the ones that make me feel less alone — if I can help convince someone that what they're going through isn't their burden alone or that someone knows something about their fight, I want to do exactly that.
"I don't have time for regrets, I just have time to worry
I can't stay up all night crying over you, I've got some worrying to do"
"Klonopinoscopy" is sonically, as "fun" a song as any I've ever written. There's exactly one minor chord, there's a saxophone, and I've been referring to it as my "country" song. But it is also explicitly about the daily pain of having the brain that I have. Before I started being extremely open about it, people often expressed surprise when I talked about living with depression and anxiety because I'm a fairly jovial dude; to that end, my music is more or less the same balancing act that I've lived my whole life. Things are sad, and I'm worried about everything, but we should probably still go to that show.