Brad Pitt has opened up about his battle with a deep depression, revealing it took a trip to Morocco for him to truly embrace life and his good fortune.

The Fight Club star spoke of his declining personal life and reliance on pot in the mid-1990s during an interview last fall and now he’s detailing the severity of his blues in the midst of his rise to fame, confessing he felt like a “waste”.

He tells The Hollywood Reporter, “I got really sick of myself at the end of the 1990s. I was hiding out from the celebrity thing; I was smoking way too much dope; I was sitting on the couch and just turning into a doughnut; and I really got irritated with myself. I got to, ‘What’s the point? I know better than this.’

“I used to deal with depression, but I don’t now, not this decade – maybe last decade.

“But that’s also figuring out who you are. I see it as a great education, as one of the seasons or a semester: ‘This semester I was majoring in depression.’ I was doing the same thing every night and numbing myself to sleep – the same routine – I couldn’t wait to get home and hide out. But that feeling of unease was growing and one night I just said, ‘This is a waste.’”

And Pitt admits the thing that saved him was an eye-opening vacation to Casablanca.

He continues, “I saw poverty to an extreme I had never witnessed before, and we talked about inequality and health care, and I saw just what I felt was so unnecessary, that people should have to survive in these circumstances – and the children were inflicted with a lot of deformities, and things that could have been avoided had become their sentence. It stuck with me.”

That’s when Pitt decided it was time to make a change: “I just quit. I stopped grass then – I mean, pretty much – and decided to get off the couch.”