500 Days in UCLA

On Kanye West, Part VII

If 2016’s The Life of Pablo has a central message, it is that Kanye’s monied and famous life in anti-Black America both induces and enables the expression of a manic bipolarity that a single personality can hardly contain. For Kanye, it seems, Black fame is madness.

In retrospect, it is perhaps unsurprising that Kanye was hospitalised for a psychiatric emergency nine months after Pablo’s release. At a show in Sacramento on November 19^th, 2016, Kanye began one of his characteristic rants. ‘Oh yeah, I’m on my Trump shit tonight,’ he said. But as the rant continued, his claims became more incoherent. ‘I’ve been sitting here to give y’all my truth even at the risk of my own life,’ he said at one point. After fifteen minutes, he abruptly ended his speech: ‘The show’s over.’ Kanye then dropped the microphone and walked off the stage. The remaining dates of the Saint Pablo tour were cancelled two days later. Later, he would claim that he felt his ‘mom talking through’ him at the end of his speech.

Two days later, on 21 November, Kanye was hospitalised. Exhausted, paranoid and delusional, Kanye was detained for his own safety. He remained under observation for over a week. Reports as to why Kanye was hospitalised vary. At first, it seemed he had suffered a ‘temporary psychosis.’ Then on 2018’s Ye, Kanye later shared that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The album’s cover read ‘I hate being Bi-Polar / It’s awesome,’ while on ‘Yikes,’ he called bipolar his ‘superpower.’¹ Afterwards, he said he was misdiagnosed; really, he was suffering from extreme sleep deprivation and exhaustion. The narrative was then revised again when he claimed he was really ‘drugged out on opioids’ after voluntary liposuction, suggesting that he developed an opiate addiction—a common form of sublimated suicidality—after he re-enacted the same circumstances that led to his mother’s death.² Other absurd excuses—that he was being medicated by Jews for claiming that slavery was a choice, or that he really had ‘mild autism’ from his car crash—later circulated too. In any case, stress, anxiety, exhaustion, and mental illness are predictable consequences of the work schedule demanded of a musician, designer, and entrepreneur of Kanye’s stature; the $53 million in personal debt he incurred when setting up his businesses caused him further angst, too. Kanye’s ‘bipolarity,’ then, may signify the pain he felt in his relentless efforts to identify with his ideals—to be a genius, a billionaire, Pablo Picasso and Pablo Escobar all at once. The pain of his narcissism, in other words.

An Aside—Even Kanye seems to have lost track of the exact timeline of events surrounding this hospitalisation. During a speech given alongside Joel Osteen in late 2019, Kanye said he released The Life of Pablo after he was hospitalised for his ‘mental breakdown.’ Unless there was another breakdown we don’t know about—this seems unlikely, especially because he refers in this speech to the UCLA hospital ward where he was taken after his mental health crisis in November 2016—Kanye’s understanding of his own history seems to have become distorted.

In truth, the exact diagnosis is not especially important (even if it is interesting to note the rather prevalent comorbidity of bipolar and narcissistic personality disorders and the psychodynamic relation between bipolarity, guilt, debt, the need for absolution and the tendency to appeal to higher powers). The point is that Kanye cracked at the height of his fame. That thoughts of murder and suicide plagued him despite his glamorous life, a disturbing fact he admits on Ye’s ‘I Thought About Killing You.’ That he survived a moment that could have killed him, as he suggests on 2019’s Jesus Is King.³ That Kanye West, champion of self-assertion and braggadocio, stood over the abyss of death, failure and disintegration and nearly fell in.

Like the car crash he suffered while he worked on The College Dropout, this incident changed West’s life. When ‘I was… at my lowest point,’ he said, ‘God was there with me and sending me visions and inspiring me.’ ‘I remember sitting in the hospital at UCLA after having a mental breakdown,’ he continued, ‘and there’s documentations of me drawing a church and saying, writing, start a church in the middle of Calabasas.’ Later, Kanye would claim that he ended up in hospital ‘where [he] needed to be medicated’ because his ‘mentality’ was not Christian enough. He would also suggest that he was ‘definitely born again,’ linking his rebirth to this time of personal crisis.

‘Christ altered my ego,’ Kanye said in 2020. In this time of collapse, where his psyche was fragmenting and his self was dissolving, Kanye reintegrated his ego around Christian ideals. But as we shall see, two other signifiers also lived in his mind alongside Christ at this time of madness: his mother and Trump. We don’t know if Kanye realised this then, but his next three records—Ye, Jesus Is King, and DONDA—would be irrevocably tied to these ideas swirling within him as his psyche disintegrated and groundlessness opened within him.