Machine Gun Kelly has opened up about undertaking therapy in a bid to beat his past drug abuse issues.

Speaking to Interview magazine, the rapper explained how he is “taking steps” to look after himself.

“Currently, my drug of choice is happiness and commitment to the art, rather than commitment to a vice that I believed made the art,” MGK said.

“I had my first therapy session… That’s the first time I ever went, ‘Hey, I need to separate these two people’, which is Machine Gun Kelly and (my real name) Colson Baker. The dichotomy is too intense for me.”

He also spoke of his hopes that undergoing therapy will have a positive impact on his own family.

“The tools that I’ve been given to start with seem helpful, I think,” he said.

“I’m still kind of ripping my hair out: ‘Why am I not changing overnight? How am I supposed to meditate for 10 minutes when I can’t even sit in my own brain for two minutes without distracting myself by doing something?’ That’s really hard. But the commitment to change is inspiring, and I think will reverberate through the universe and definitely through my family.”

When asked who inspired the change, MGK said that Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker played a major part after they met on the set of the movie Midnight In The Switchgrass.

“Travis Barker has been huge in the process of grounding me, because he’s lived it… It’s much different than a priest or something, where I’m like, ‘How can you relate to me…?’ With Travis, it’s like, ‘I know for a fact that you went through what I’m going through’,” he said.

“And then obviously, when you have a partner sitting there with you on those dark nights when you’re sweating and not being able to figure out why you’re so in your head, to help you get out of your head and put it in perspective, that really, really helps.”

Meanwhile, Machine Gun Kelly hasrevealed that he wants to release another album at some point next year.

Elsewhere in the broadcast, MGK revealed to fans that his ‘Tickets To My Downfall’ musical will come out “early December, I think [the] first week of December”. He told NME last month that filming for the “pop-punk Grease” had already wrapped.