Dwayne Johnson opens up about his depression

Action-film star Dwayne Johnson, who has spoken previously about his battle with depression, expanded on the topic over the weekend.

“I reached a point where I didn’t want to do a thing or go anywhere,” the “Rampage” star, 45, said in the U.K. tabloid Daily Express on Sunday, without giving a specific context or time frame. “I was crying constantly,” he added.

Later tweeting a link to a report about that story in a different outlet, Johnson wrote, “Got tons of responses to this. Thank you. We all go thru the sludge/[expletive] and depression never discriminates. Took me a long time to realize it, but the key is to not be afraid to open up. Especially us dudes have a tendency to keep it in. You’re not alone.”

The Express story also published Johnson quotes from an Instagram post he made on Feb. 1, but without identifying that source, leading some outlets to inaccurately state the quotes were from an interview with the tabloid. Johnson had written in part, “Struggle and pain is real. We’ve all been there on some level or another. My mom tried to check out when I was 15. She got outta the car on Interstate 65 in Nashville and walked into oncoming traffic. Big rigs and cars swerving outta the way not to hit her. I grabbed her and pulled her back on the gravel shoulder of the road.”

He had gone on to write in the post that shooting a graveyard scene for his HBO comedy “Ballers” proved a “reminder that we always gotta do our best to really pay attention when people are in pain. Help ’em thru it, get ’em talkin’ about the struggle and remind ’em that they’re not alone.”

Clinical depression is distinct from normal transient sadness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, which specifies that for a diagnosis of depression, “symptoms must be present for at least two weeks.” Genetic predisposition and brain-chemical composition are factors, and the condition can take forms including persistent depressive disorder (dysthymia), postpartum depression, psychotic depression, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder and others.

Johnson told Oprah Winfrey in a 2015 “Oprah’s Master Class” special, “I found that with depression, one of the most important things you could realize is that you’re not alone. You’re not the first to go through it,” he said, adding, “I wish I had someone at that time who could just pull me aside and [tell me], ‘Hey, it’s going to be OK.’ ”

Forbes magazine named Johnson the second-highest-paid film star of 2017, with earnings of $65 million.