When I was a kid, there was a man who used to stand outside the supermarket, topless whatever the weather, and shout that he was Jesus. Of course, nobody took his claim as proof that he was Jesus for a simple reason: he was, quite clearly, crazy.
No one would use such language today, now that we live in the age of mental health hyperawareness and have so overcorrected from seeing psychological problems as a negative to instead celebrating them as a unique special quality. By this point pretty much every professional athlete has talked about their OCD and the number of TV presenters diagnosed with ADHD seems to outnumber those without by about 10,000 to 1. We’ve never been so deluged with talk about mental health, or so soaked in the message that those with psychological difficulties deserve compassion, even celebration, not name-calling.
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So it seems pretty ironic that people back in the prehistoric 1980s had, in certain crucial respects, a better understanding of what mental disorders actually look like than those in the hashtag-mental-health 2020s. Which brings me to Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West.
Last week West took out a full-page advert in The Wall Street Journal entitled “To those I’ve hurt”, which included the key sentences: “I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people.” Yup, a lot of people think West is an antisemite, and the reason they think it is because he has said so, over and over again. To list all the examples would exceed my word count. So I’ll limit myself to the most notable, which was releasing a song last May called Heil Hitler, later renamed Nigga Heil Hitler, presumably because West felt the original title was just too vanilla.
All pretty Nazi-adjacent. In his apology letter West says — as he has said before — that he is not actually antisemitic but instead has bipolar disorder and “lost touch with reality”. What’s new about this particular letter is that West claims his bipolar disorder was at least partly caused by the 2001 car crash that inspired his first hit song, Through the Wire, which he sang, literally, through the wire holding together his shattered jaw. Whether the crash permanently altered his brain is debatable. But what is undeniable is that West is bipolar.
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West has always been, shall we say, pretty out there. He became increasingly unstable after the death of his beloved mother, Donda, in 2007, and over the past decade has had bouts of full-blown mania. Even leaving aside all the recent Nazi stuff, here — in no particular order — are some examples of his more unhinged actions: in 2021 he paid almost $60 million for a house in Malibu and so comprehensively trashed it that The New Yorker magazine ran a 10,000-word feature about West’s “architectural ruin”, which he then sold without ever living in it; he started a short-lived church which was widely described as a cult; he announced at a concert that his one-time friend Jay-Z was trying to kill him; he changed his name to Ye.
Plus he has talked about being bipolar. Like, a lot. On the cover of his 2018 album Ye are the words “I hate being / Bi-Polar / It’s awesome.” By far the most devastating evidence of West’s mental deterioration is the 2022 documentary about him, Jeen-Yuhs, made by West’s friend Coodie Simmons. It begins with West as a young, happy and lavishly talented producer trying to make his name, which — spoiler! — he does. And then he loses his mother, and soon afterwards loses his mind so completely, and rants so manically, that Simmons — horrified — turns off the camera.
In short, if ever there was a living definition of bipolar disorder, it would be West. And so, what — in this mental health awareness era — was the reaction to West’s confirmation last week, again, that he is mentally unwell? Go screw that antisemite, pretty much. These days mental health means starting a Substack about how you’ve finally realised, at the age of 52, you’re neurodiverse, and the world must now respect your triggers. It absolutely does not mean anything as ugly as people ranting about Hitler, let alone making accommodations for those people, because that won’t get you the good likes on Instagram, no matter how many sparkly filters you put on it. In sanitising how we talk about mental illness, we’ve sanitised how we think mental illness should look.
But mental illness has always looked exactly like West. His rants about Hitler draw a bigger crowd than the supermarket man’s about Jesus did, but that’s about celebrity, and not actually his fault. It’s his fault for not sticking with his treatment, some say, which is as absurd as castigating Karen Carpenter for starving herself to death, or the great Hollywood producer and pilot Howard Hughes for ending his days paralysed by a phobia of germs and surrounded by bottles of his own urine.
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Hughes is the most obvious precursor to West: a man who achieved enormous fame and fortune, only for his mind to shatter, making him a figure of public mockery by the time he died in 1976. We think we’ve progressed since then, but we haven’t. Once, we thought of mental illness as evil; now we think of it as quirky. But it’s neither: it’s ugly and tragic. In his pomp West could always predict the next music trend, from dance to vocoder. But we all lose our touch in middle age and although West boarded the mental health trend ahead of the game, he made the mistake of developing the wrong kind of mental illness. Not the hashtag kind. The crazy kind.