Yeah, well, he’s mentally ill. Bipolar disorder is a physical illness, and being rich and famous doesn’t make it easy to manage. The only advantage his wealth gives him is the ability to get treatment.
In other words, I think Kim K.W. has a point. His actions are the result of a medical condition. One of the problems of mental illness is that the mind that has the problem is the same one that has to figure out how to deal with it. That’s one of the reasons things like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are so intractable.
As for the failures of those close to Kanye to stop him: I take it you’ve never had a close friend or relative with a severe mental illness. You can’t just stop someone from being sick. And being rich and famous might actually make it harder.
I have had close friends, girlfriends and family members with severe mental illnesses and while no, you can’t stop them from being sick, you can help to limit the stupid shit they do.
I agree that being wealthy makes it harder for anyone to help him: he has all the power in most of his relationships.
I’ve known several people with bipolar disease and I would not trade places with them. My cousin in particular, believes that he is a very good singer and that a lot of famous people are either responsible for his non existent career out of jealousy or are going to lead to his success as soon as he can make his way to them in Vegas or Hollywood or wherever they are.
His life is very lonely because no-one can stand to be around him for any length of time. He stops his meds because he doesn’t like the way they make him feel. It’s really very sad.
When we have tons of people who struggle with mental illness and have no options available to them, I’m hard pressed to feel too bad for the billionaire married to the other billionaire with every resource in the world at their fingertips but he doesn’t feel like getting treatment because “oh no what about my music!”
He doesn’t feel like getting treatment because the same illness for which he needs treatment is telling him that he doesn’t really need it. That is the nasty thing about bipolar disorder: your mind convinces you that you are smarter, more creative, more intelligent, and all around better when you are manic, so treatment is just somebody else’s plot to make you dumber or more easily controlled.
What I do think is that Beyonce can and should exert a lot more influence on him to address his issues and get treatment. She’s his wife, the mother of his children and, well, BEYONCE! If she can’t accomplish that, who can?
A billionaire is practically a corporation that employs a lot of staff (security, caretakers, etc). West has an entourage, and they are probably enablers (since they want to keep their jobs). Michael Jackson, another celebrity with mental health problems, ran into the same problem: his entourage included a doctor who kept getting him harmful non-prescription drugs, a direct violation of medical laws.
Despite his wealth, which should make affording treatment and buying medicine easy, West cannot decide for himself that he needs treatment, nor is there anyone around him who can convince him to get treatment. West said he understood he might break up with his wife, so it seems she can’t convince him either. (Perhaps he considers her concerns about his health to be nagging? That’s probably why she is talking publicly about his problem.)
In addition to the entourage problem, West is always in the public eye. Many people suffer from mental health problems. Some of these people even run for president, some even every four years. However nobody really pays much attention to them if they are not celebrities, so they don’t face having their dignity damaged in public.
I remember reading that a music writer who hung out with and interviewed Elvis Presley for several weeks in the last year of his life was appalled to see how many people in his vast entourage were happy to sponge off The King, but how few genuinely cared about him or were inclined to lift even a finger to stop him from slowly but surely killing himself with drugs, food and sloth.
Exactly. Mania is like overconfidence, as opposed to depression, which is like under confidence. Currently Kanye is making rash decisions from an overconfident state that he will regret later. A little bit of mania (called hypomania) might give a person a certain charisma in the early stages, but irritability soon takes over and it’s hard to make any sound decisions at all.
