Lil Wayne Opens Up About His Suicide Attempt And Mental Health
Lil Wayne recently shared about his sucidie attempt and his struggles with mental health.
In an interview with Emmanuel Acho on his Uncomfortable Conversations series, Wayne said, "(I'm) hoping I can help anyone else out there who's dealing with mental health problems by... being vulnerable. To me, I look at it by being brave and stepping up."
He continued, "Once my thoughts got radical and got to where you've got to stop yourself and stop and pause and say, 'What did you just think again?' Even if you've cried yourself to sleep with that thought on your mind and wake up the next day and be like, 'I cannot believe I was thinking like that.' "
The New Orleans native referred to the time when as a boy of only 12 years old, he tried to take his own life.
Back in 2018, Lil Wayne opened up at the BET Hip-Hop Awards about this heartbreaking incident and how a police officer, who he calls “Uncle Bob,” saved his life.
While accepting the I Am Hip-Hop Award, Wayne said about Uncle Bob, who was at the time a homicide detective, “He came into an apartment one day, he bust in the door. Guns drawn—he saw nobody. He saw legs on the floor. It was my legs. He saw blood everywhere. A bunch of police hopped over me. He refused to do so.”
A young Dwayne Carter was found near death. The boy had shot himself in the chest as the result of a mental health episode.
Weezy said that EMS was there, which he never knew, but told Uncle Bob that they could not resuscitate Wayne. That’s when he took matters into his own hands and rushed the 12-year-old Wayne to the hospital on his own accord, refusing to leave until he was certain that Wayne’s life would be saved.
The 38-year-old told Acho about the struggles he was feeling at the time, "You have no one to vent to, no one to get this out to. You can't bring it to your friends at school – you're still trying to be cool to them. You're not trying to let them know you've got something going on at home."
He also said to anyone else struggling with mental health that he wants them to know their pain is real, "There is no bar to measure how real. It's real. It's so real that if someone even has the guts, the heart, the bravery, whatever to at least admit that they have something going on up there that they're not sure about, it's so real that we should only react in the realest way possible."
Watch the discussion below:
