After abruptly cancelling all of the upcoming shows in his successful Saint Pablo tour, Kanye West has been hospitalized in Los Angeles, TMZ reports.
While West and his wife Kim Kardashian have yet to release an official statement, and there is no confirmation about the nature of his hospitalization, TMZ reports that he was seen in an ambulance, in handcuffs.
There are multiple reasons, of course, he may have been handcuffed, the most obvious being that he had committed a crime. However, being handcuffed is common after a suicide attempt or any other psychiatric episode that warrants “apprehension”- when you can be legally held in a hospital, mental institution or rehab for your safety or the safety of others.
Again, right now we can’t verify his hospitalization or the reasons behind it- but given his strange behaviour over the last few weeks, there’s a good chance this might be related to his mental health.
Okay, it’s no secret that Kanye has a habit of going on outrageous rants, but lately they’ve been piling up. Between endorsing Donald Trump– contradicting his past political statements and even his own song lyrics– and going on a rant about his (former?) friends Beyonce and Jay-Z, it’s safe to say that Kanye’s behaviour has been abnormal. In fact, some could even say this behaviour resembles self-sabotage, which is common for people struggling with mental illness. In fact, plenty of his song lyrics have dealt with themes of loss, insecurity, identity, and intimacy issues. It would be far from shocking if this recent ordeal is confirmed to be related to the rapper’s mental health.
Needless to say, Kanye West is one of the most famous people in the world. Just weeks after his wife faced criticism after surviving a traumatic and harrowing ordeal, his mental health is sure to be widely discussed, regardless of whether the rumours are confirmed to be true. So let’s make that inevitable discussion a positive one.
First and foremost, let’s be compassionate, understanding and open, regardless of how we feel about Kanye or his music or his wife or Taylor Swift or anything else. Let’s remember that this is about, before anything else, the wellbeing and health of an actual person. His struggles and his adversity is just as valid as ours.
Let’s also remember that mental illness does not always manifest itself in socially acceptable ways. When we think about supporting people with mental illnesses, we think about being a shoulder to cry on or complimenting and comforting your friend’s anxiety disorder into non-existence. We don’t think about when compliments, “rational” arguments and “you can vent to me” texts don’t work. We think about the people with “acceptable” illnesses- the ones who are depressed or anxious, the ones who are high-functioning, whose actions and behaviour ultimately cause little harm to those around them, whose symptoms are often self-contained. When we think of the hyperactive students we encountered in elementary school, we don’t like to think of them as children struggling with ADD or ADHD, we like to think of them as “bad” kids who disrupted class and whose parents must not have raised them right. When we think about mental health advocacy, we don’t think about people who experience emotional extremes or exhibit attention seeking behaviour or people who are unemployed, going days without so much as brushing their teeth. We don’t think about the friend who will lash out at you or the stranger who will talk to himself or the celebrity who will, in front of thousands of concert-goers and millions of social media followers, go on strange and confusing rants about Donald Trump and Jay-Z.
Personally, I find it interesting about how stories surrounding mental illness are played out by the media- albeit, interesting in a really tragic and concerning way. Oftentimes, the stories presented to us are the “socially acceptable” ones. You’ll hear about a star going to rehab and then treated as though they have magically crossed an invisible line into the world of the fully recovered, you hear about conventionally attractive eating disorder sufferers who “never had anything to worry about”, you hear about a celebrity who committed suicide as though they were a martyr to their art form-if any “strange” or “weird” things happen, they are almost always presented as the result of drugs, not mental illness within itself.
We rarely hear stories about those who don’t fit into these narratives- the male eating disorder sufferer, the obsessive recluse, the mentally ill person who isn’t inherently “likeable” and sympathetic.
It really, really sucks that Kanye West is here to throw a wrench in this narrative, because that means that he’s struggling with something real and valid, and it means that those struggles have accidentally found a global platform. Kanye will continue into treatment, get worse or better, or be released and pretend nothing ever happened, and the world will be watching as it all unfolds. That really, really sucks. But if this conversation is going to happen no matter what, the least we can do is make sure we learn something from it.
