The past two years have been tough for hip hop fans. Rappers have been unexpectedly dying left and right. If it’s not due to drug use, it’s due to mental health. Mental health has been overlooked in the music industry forever. With so many young rappers getting famous nearly overnight, mental health issues have been skyrocketing. How these artists deal with their pain is typically not healthy.
Most of the rap genre consists of black men and women, and their mental health only worsens when they begin to get a lot of attention. According to a 2015 study by The National Alliance on Mental Illness, black Americans are 20 percent more likely to experience mental health issues. They are also half as likely to actually use mental health resources than their white counterparts. Many black Americans can’t afford to pay for talk therapy or other psychological resources. This creates a cycle of unhealthy patterns that gets reflected onto later generations. In reality, the entire genre is plagued with mental health issues, even outside of the black majority.
In the age of the internet, regular teens and young adults alike can get famous in an instant. Going from rags to riches so quickly can cause a major mental shock. Having millions of people start watching your every move and friends you once thought you knew using you for your money can mess up the way you trust people. Feeling alone and used leads to many types of mental disorders like anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. If any of these artists get help, they immediately get prescribed medications like Xanax or Prozac, which are highly addictive. Once they get on these drugs, it can be very difficult to get off of them.
With rapper Lil Peep’s death in late 2017 due to a drug overdose and rapper Mac Miller’s death earlier this month for the same reason, the mental health and drug use problems have become widely noticed. Rapper J. Cole even released an entire album earlier this year, KOD, that he proclaimed was aimed at all of the young rappers who are on the path of death by overdose.
However, even as the problem appears to get worse, no one has been able to come up with a solution to save the lives of many young artists.