Asmongold’s long battle with mental health that’s seen him “live like an animal for 13 years”

Isaac McIntyre

Isaac McIntyre

The star streamer has long been questioned on his lifestyle.

Veteran Twitch star Asmongold has opened up on the mental health struggles he's dealt with through his broadcasting career, admitting they're of the biggest reasons why he's been "living like an animal for 13 years."

“People are always wondering ‘why would a person live like this... and why am I like this?'” Asmongold shared with his fans early in a 35-minute YouTube video uploaded earlier this week. “I actually haven't always been like this. It’s a relatively new thing for me. It started in high school and later on, it entered phase two. Around 21 or 23 is when the degeneracy ramped up.”

That degeneracy has made headlines more than a few times. Including when he admitted he'd not cleaned his gaming room in years or when he found a long-dead rat in his filthy house. The latter of which may have been why he decided to open up to his fans on this topic.

The 34-year-old, who also goes by ZackRawrr on some channels, admitted he's always struggled to understand how people should act, how to "treat people right," and what to say in general conversations. This led to him making very few friends through his schooling life. A situation not helped by the fact that he sometimes went out of his way to hurt his schoolmates.

“I pretty much gave up on being a normal person,” he continued, before adding: “I felt like I was not capable of that based on the experiences I had.”

As he got older, Asmongold shared, he “started trying to mask my emotions.”

World of Warcraft saved Asmongold's life

One topic Asmongold came back to again and again in his lengthy YouTube tell-all was the video game that basically crowned him king of the MMO streamers: World of Warcraft, which he still regularly plays.

For the 34-year-old in his younger years, WoW quickly became an escape. He threw himself into Azeroth more and more, eventually becoming "one of the highest-rated warriors in WoW at the time." There were upsides, like the streamer claiming he learned more about business and its practices through the Blizzard MMORPG than any school could have taught him.

Perhaps the biggest thing WoW did for Asmongold though was save his life. The streamer allayed fan worries by saying he's happy now, but then revealed it hadn't always been that way. For a long time early in his life he always thought “[he] would kill [himself] after high school.” That was a plan he carried for quite some time, until he "forgot" about it after the much-lauded The Wrath of the Lich King expansion was released for WoW in 2008.

“I did want to kill myself. But I decided instead of killing myself, I’d do something even worse, I’d start streaming. For money... I needed some f**king money.”

WoW has been a core part of Asmongold's life since he was a kid. (Images via Asmongold/Blizzard)
WoW has been a core part of Asmongold's life since he was a kid. (Images via Asmongold/Blizzard)

Asmongold finished his video by declaring he doesn't "give a f**k" about sympathy and didn't want any attention. Instead, he just wanted to share his story. “I wanted people to see where I'm coming from as a person.”

The Twitch star was last live 12 hours ago through his ZackRawrr profile.