Jon Hamm struggled with depression as a teenager and into his 20s, the Mad Men star recently revealed to The Observer.

Hamm’s mother died when he was 10, leaving his father to raise him. But, while in college at the age of 20, Hamm’s father also passed away. He talked about this time in his life and the effects it had on the rest of his life in an interview with the UK magazine recently…

On his father’s death when Jon was 20:
“I was… unmoored by that. But I was very fortunate to have really good friends in my life whose parents sort of rallied: ‘We’re gonna help this kid out, because otherwise there’s going to be trouble…’ I struggled with chronic depression. I was in bad shape. I knew I had to get back in school and back in some kind of structured environment and… continue.”

On treating his depression:
“I did do therapy and antidepressants for a brief period, which helped me. Which is what therapy does: it gives you another perspective when you are so lost in your own spiral, your own bullshit. It helps. And honestly? Antidepressants help! If you can change your brain chemistry enough to think: ‘I want to get up in the morning; I don’t want to sleep until four in the afternoon. I want to get up and go do my shit and go to work and…’ Reset the auto-meter, kick-start the engine!”

On how his parents’ deaths affected his acting career:
“Well, the theatre department always seems to be the sort of… way station for the orphans and all the people who don’t fit in anywhere else. I always swirled back to it.”

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This post was written by Eric Van Dril. For more of his writing, visit his Twitter.