• by Ed DeNicola , Op-Ed Contributor, October 31, 2022

Some of the posts that Kanye West made against Jewish people were recently shared with me. They’re bad, unjustified, and made worse because of his fame and influence, not to mention that he is looking to purchase the social media website known as Parler.

It's public information that Kanye West was diagnosed with bipolar illness. His behavior has been deteriorating recently.

He has destroyed some highly lucrative business deals that likely took a great deal of time and effort to close. These include deals with Adidas, Gap, CAA, MRC Entertainment, TJ Maxx and Footlocker. The question becomes: do you think his bipolar illness is influencing his speech?

Unfortunately for me, as the famous song by John Fogerty goes, I'm not a senator's son.

My dad too was bipolar. A little about bipolar illness: it can be a terrible condition to have.

My father was diagnosed with bipolar illness when he was in his late twenties. He was put on a medication called Lithium that helped, but the use of it led to kidney disease and dialysis later in life. He passed away at the age of 79 in 2020. Even with his illness and all the problems, we loved him very much and were very fortunate to have had him for as long as we did.

The two polars of bipolar are the manic and depressed states. When my dad was manic, he was on the top of the world. He smoked and drank too much, went out all the time, was up all night and had delusions of grandeur. He would very literally be out of his mind and would say the meanest, nastiest things to anyone who got in his way including his wife, his family and the people who worked at the medical facilities that tried to help him. Some of what he said was so over-the-top insulting, you just had to laugh.

Shortly following the manic episode, my dad would get extremely depressed. It would be very difficult for him to get out of bed in the morning and on top of that he would have to deal with all the trouble he caused while he was manic. This included running up credit card bills, saying awful things and occasionally getting into trouble with the police for small misdemeanors. He had to file for bankruptcy two or three times. He would need constant support just to function.

It makes me wonder whether Kanye West will have a similar experience to my dad's and wake up one day at the end of a manic cycle and realize all the damage done to his relationships and finances -- the realizations coming to him while he is depressed due to the onset of the depressive cycle from his illness.

Fortunately for my dad and his family, medicine improved and doctors were able to do a better job of normalizing his illness through the use of a variety of drugs. This required that he take a delicate mix of pharmaceuticals that were largely developed over time through science and some trial and error with the patient.

It was easy to mess up and my dad would occasionally get out of sorts until the doctors could fix the problem. He was in and out of psychiatric hospitals including Carrier, Marlboro and New Jersey’s State Psychiatric facility in Trenton.

Carrier was a real blessing. We called it the country club. He didn’t mind going because it was a nice place, and he was treated well. Unfortunately, his insurance only covered so many stays at that location. Once it ran out, he had to go to government-run hospitals like the ones in Marlboro and Trenton. These hospitals had very sick people and were not nice places to visit, much less stay.

It was probably difficult for my dad to stay on his medication because the feeling of being manic was so exciting. The medicine he had to take slowed him down quite a bit. It probably made his life a bit boring at times. Although, for his family, the absence of all the nonsense and problems felt like bliss.

It’s important to note that while my father said the most awful things to us when he was manic, he loved his family deeply and wanted to be around us all the time. His sickness-induced remarks had very little to do with how he truly felt.

It’s very possible that Kanye West’s bipolar illness is influencing the posts that he’s recently made online.

For more information on this topic see Bipolar illness is complicated. So is how we talk about Ye. It was written by Kiana Fitzgerald, who was also diagnosed with bipolar illness.