'Gold Rush': Rick Ness Talks About His Big Return After Mental Health Struggles (Exclusive)

Gold Rush's Rick Ness is back with "new energy" and "new enthusiasm" after taking more than a year off from mining to care for his mental health. Ness opened up to PopCulture.com about making his grand return to the Klondike ahead of the Discovery Channel show's season premiere Friday, revealing that although stepping back from mining wasn't an easy decision, it was a "necessary" one. 

"It was a tough [decision] to make because when you do something like that, you're not sure if you can ever come back. But the way that it was heading, it was either chance that or it was about to derail anyway," Ness told PopCulture. "Stress and mental health stuff just was really weighing me down, and I didn't really know how to deal with it because I didn't know what I was dealing with. So I had to step back and reevaluate a lot of things."

"When I was starting to deal with the depression and then stuff like that, I didn't know what that was. I've never dealt with that before," Ness explained. "And so rather than reaching out, I [was] trying to be the tough guy and figure it out myself, and I started losing a lot of confidence in myself because I didn't know what the hell was going on."

After a "long journey" figuring all that out, Ness realized his place was back up in the Klondike. "I said, 'Listen, I've got over a decade in [mining]. ... That's over a quarter of my life, and do I really want to walk away from that?' And I said, 'No, I don't.' So I went to work just getting everything back in place and figuring myself out and said, 'If I'm going to make a comeback, it's got to happen now, and it's got to be big.'" Hitting the ground running, Ness said his "energy just went way up," assuring him he made the right decision.

Ness' big comeback was not without obstacles – from finances to starting off with a brand new team and equipment – but what he did have was the support of former mine boss Parker Schnabel. "I went and saw Parker when I got up here, and I hadn't talked to him or seen him in probably a couple years," Ness shared. "He had some nice things to say. It was really good, actually." While other miners had counted Ness out for good, Schnabel had full faith his colleague would make a grand return. "He said when he was hearing those things, he just said, 'You know what? Rick's a survivor. Don't be surprised to see him back,'" Ness recalled. "It was nice. It was nice to hear from Parker."

Opening up about his mental health struggles was "uncomfortable" at first, but Ness said he's always been one to "own up for anything I've done" and hopes that other people can see themselves in his journey. "I'm like, man, there's no way I'm the only one, and so if I was unwilling to talk about it before ... if I talk about it now, maybe someone else will and it'll change someone else's life," he told PopCulture. "I don't know. I'm not looking to change lives, but I think for me personally, it's easy for me to share what I've gone through and if it helps people, that's amazing." 

See Ness' return to the Klondike when Gold Rush returns for a new season on Friday, Sept. 29 at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Discovery.