Lori Falce: Kanye West and the dangers of ignoring mental health

I am somehow confident that if I decided to make repeated veiled and not-so-veiled threats against an ex’s new love interest, I would receive a visit from law enforcement.

This would be especially likely if those threats were on my social media accounts with just a thousand or so followers between them. What happens on the internet, after all, is never private and hangs around forever.

The reality of this — like the knowledge of speeding tickets and other penalties for rash decisions — keeps my urges to lash out in check.

Kanye West does not have those kinds of restrictions. It’s just one of the things that makes the billionaire musician different from me. It shouldn’t.

West’s mental health has been a matter of speculation for years as his erratic behavior has played out on a public stage. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2016 and has spoken openly about how the condition affects him, with wild manic phases. Like many other people with bipolar diagnoses, he doesn’t take medication — a factor Kim Kardashian brought up when the two separated.

This isn’t terribly surprising. Artistic individuals sometimes like the creative high of manic phases, even if they come with downsides such as paranoia or a circular fixation on a particular idea.

For West, that fixation has become comedian Pete Davidson, who began dating Kardashian after she appeared on “Saturday Night Live” in 2021. For weeks, despite having a new girlfriend, West has posted on Instagram obsessing over his ex and her new beau, often verging on threatening and sometimes encouraging his fans to take up his cause.

West has 15 million followers on Instagram. He has 30 million on Twitter.

On Wednesday, after a court declared Kardashian legally single amid the divorce proceedings, West released a video that depicts him kidnapping, burying and decapitating Davidson. If anyone who wasn’t a famous billionaire did this, it would involve police and possibly an involuntary mental health stay.

This has prompted a lot of attention on West’s behavior as dangerous and crazy. It is helpful for everyone to focus on why it is dangerous. While it would help West to have qualified people and those who care about him spend time addressing his mental health issues, it helps no one to throw around words like deranged and psycho.

The problem here is that it is a collision of two important issues that both deserve attention and don’t deserve to be tangled.

Kardashian may be a nauseatingly rich celebrity, but she also is a woman being targeted by a powerful man because she had the audacity to leave. Davidson is a bystander who did nothing but what has become his shtick in recent years — dating the recently single after high-profile breakups.

These are domestic violence issues that are familiar to too many people of all economic strata, and they need to be taken seriously.

So does mental health — before the situation becomes dangerous and mental health becomes a straw man for not dealing with other causes of violent crime.