Mental health issues like depression and anxiety are difficult for anyone to talk about openly. For artists and celebrities who are faced with the pressure of churning out quality work to keep their fans happy, that stress can often be magnified. That’s why we’re thankful for celebrities like Big Sean who are helping to erase the stigma of mental health by being candid about their experiences in therapy.
After taking a one year hiatus, the Detroit-born rapper celebrated his 31st birthday by sharing that he took the much-needed time off to heal. In a series of three videos, Big Sean explained that it was necessary to step away from the spotlight to tend to his mental health.
“I’m definitely seeing things different than I used to see them,” Sean tells his 11 million Instagram followers. “I just wanted to speak on it, and share because a lot of ya’ll need insight like I do, and probably feel similar too. Around this time last year, around my birthday, it was good for me but it was wild for me too, because I felt like something wasn’t all the way connecting with my energy. I’m big on energy. And I wasn’t feeling like myself, I couldn’t figure out why.”
“So what I did was I stepped back from everything I was doing,” he continues. “Everything I had going on, because somewhere in the middle of it, dawg I just felt lost. I didn’t know how I got there. I been meditating since I was seventeen years old, that helps with anxiety, depression, all them things. It wasn’t doing it all the way for this, so I knew this required some special attention.”
In a second video about clarity, Sean talks about the therapy process. “The deal was, I started therapy,” he explains. “I got a good therapist. I was blessed enough to talk to some super spiritual people. They made me realize one thing I was missing in my life, and the one thing I was missing was clarity. Clarity about who was around me, what I was doing.”
In the final message, Sean looks forward to returning to music a changed man with a renewed sense of purpose. “I started realizing, you can’t depend on somebody for love and a good time and all that if you can’t give it to yourself,” he says. “I started doing things by myself, doing things I never thought I’d do, like going skydiving or whatever I thought was fun. In the midst I definitely re-discovered myself. Found a whole new energy, and me being a source of it and not somebody else.
