Lil Nas X

When People with Bipolar Mood Disorder Make the News

When People with Bipolar Mood Disorder Make the News

A few days ago I read a newspaper clip about the musician Lil Nas X (Montero Lamar Hill), who was spotted last summer walking naked down a busy street in the San Fernando Valley and arrested for assaulting the police officers called to the scene. Funny, right?

An essay in my upcoming collection The Lunatics’ Ball opens with a similar newspaper report: a woman apprehended after a 120-mph high-speed chase told Kentucky State Police troopers that she was Mother Mary on her way to pick up Baby Jesus, and had God’s permission to speed. The item appeared in our local newspaper in “News of the Weird” and I was initially annoyed that the newspaper gave readers the opportunity to chuckle over someone who was mentally ill, probably bipolar. “Here’s a weird one!” There was no mention of mental illness. But then I laughed too, because anyone who’s experienced mania knows it can be an exhilarating wild ride. Maybe what annoyed me was outsiders laughing at the story.

When I looked up Lil Nas X, I discovered that he’s very well known. First, for combining country and trap beats in his wildly successful, genre-bending, Grammy award-winning hit “Old Town Road” in 2018. And then for coming out as publicly gay in 2019. That could have tanked his career, but he maintained his popularity with “C7osure (You Like)” and “(Montero) Call Me By Your Name,” addressing his new public persona and the religious backlash. Despite pushback from the country music and rap communities, he’s forged his own path.

The incident in the San Fernando Valley could have had a tragic outcome, and not just for his career. So many police encounters with the mentally ill end in death. A recent report estimated that as many as one third of fatal police shootings involve a victim in a mental health crisis. Lil Nas X is Black, and while he wasn’t armed (often the case in such fatalities), he actually attacked the police, making that outcome even more likely.

But the police didn’t shoot him. He was charged with resisting arrest and three counts of battery on a police officer (punishable with up to five years of prison time), and required to enter a drug treatment program while he awaited trial.

During that time, he was diagnosed as bipolar.

Recently a judge allowed him to enter a mental health diversion program with the possibility of dismissing the felonies.

He’s back in the news because of a video he issued last week. “There’s no way I’m gonna be able to make this like not awkward, cause it’s really awkward for me,” he said, explaining that he’d been in rehab for the past few months. What he said about his bipolar diagnosis seems very poignant to me. Maybe because The Lunatics’ Ball became a sort of “coming out” ball as I wrote it, after years of hiding my bipolar diagnosis. For me, that was not an easy thing. Here’s someone who did the difficult work of “coming out” publicly in a homophobic industry, now prepared to come out again in a culture that continues to stigmatize mental illness.

Here’s what he said: “I have a therapist now and a psychiatrist, which has been really helpful. When I got my bipolar disorder diagnosis, I feel like I had known for the past few years, but I didn’t want to admit to it ‘cause I didn’t want to have to take medication and I don’t know, have people think different of me.”

I’m touched by his sincerity and openness. It happens that two fiction writers whose work I admire came out as bipolar in the past few weeks (on a podcast and in an article in Lit Hub), one of them expressing gratitude for the medications that made her creative work possible. When I read about Lil Nas X, I thought yes, it feels good to be part of a community. Maybe having people “think different” of us is even a good thing.

Here’s the remix of “Old Town Road” with Billy Ray Cyrus that won a Grammy for Best Music Video, if you don’t already know it.