No longer at peace

“I am not at peace,” rapper Kid Cudi wrote in a Facebook post two days ago, confessing that he had checked himself into a rehabilitation facility for suicidal urges and depression. “I haven’t been since you’ve known me.”

He went on to explain that he had battled anxiety and depression his whole life, and that he had decided to seek help—“If I didn’t come here I would have done something to myself.” While sadness and despair are not a new theme in hip-hop and rap, the admission comes free of wordplay and plausible deniability. These are just the plainspoken words of a man who is at the end of his tether. Peppered by the words “I’m sorry,”  it is a raw, frank, and vulnerable post from what seems like an unlikely party: A black male rapper is a far cry from the picture of the jittery, self-absorbed weakling we probably have in our heads when we think about anxiety and depression. We can only guess what it is that he’s apologizing for exactly. Is it an apology for appearing to be something other than a strong aloof male figure? Is it for being vulnerable? Is it for being human? Certainly it’s hard to imagine Kid Cudi, actor, rapper and trendsetter, in a “Girl, Interrupted” situation, singing songs and joining communal activities while in milieu therapy. Maybe it’s time to start asking: Why is this the case? It becomes increasingly evident that while men are at just as much risk of suffering from a host of mental problems, they are also the social group least able to express it or to seek help for it. The stigma of mental health problems is bad enough. The culture of hypermasculinity makes it a double whammy.

It only goes to show that any person’s public life can be only the tip of a miserable iceberg. Since the advent of social media we are almost all searchable online, and the way we curate our social media content represents us in ways both intended and unintended. And yet no matter how much we reveal online—from what sandwiches we ate for lunch to what pair of sneakers we’re saving up the money to buy—there is still a part that is unknowable to even our most favored Facebook friends. If Kid Cudi could be miserable, then the Facebook friend who posts only cat videos and happy Bible quotes could be hiding an ocean of misery.

Some have called Kid Cudi’s leap into Facebook vulnerability brave, and maybe it is. Most of his fans seem to have shown their support, but in hip hop (as in any other subculture), mental illness is just another word for weakness, and extremes like suicide more often win derision and not empathy.

Some have called this and other “confessions” by public figures “TMI”—too much information, the airing of dirty laundry—showing to the world too much of what needs to be kept private. But maybe that’s important, too.

If the social justice movement of the last decade has taught millennials anything, after all, it’s that representation matters. It matters that our favored celebrities, who seem to have it all, are able to talk about being unhappy and the need to seek help for it. It matters that fictional characters can mirror the anxiety or dread felt by many who are silently watching; it matters that Holly Golightly talks about her anxiety as the mean reds, and it matters that we see characters on TV and in the movies taking prescription medications and benefiting from them. It matters that we normalize discussion on mental health without equating it with weakness or excuses, and it matters that more and more people realize that it’s a problem with at least the hope of a solution. If the trending Twitter hashtag #YouAGoodMan—a label for posts supporting Kid Cudi in particular and men’s mental health in general—is any indication, we’re on the right track.

This column has often spoken about mental health and that’s not about to change any time soon. It’s about time we had this conversation. And until mental health discussions are normalized, and someone like Kid Cudi could make a public confession without saying “I’m sorry” in every other sentence, this is a conversation we need to keep having.

kaychuarivera@yahoo.com