College Professor to Use Kanye West as Case Study for Mental Illness Lecture
Dr. Jeffrey McCune, a college professor at St. Louis’s Washington University, will be using Kanye West’s very public breakdowns as a case study for mental illness. If a college professor using West as an example to teach his curriculum sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’re remembering this from earlier in 2017. And yes, it’s the same instructor.
Name One Genius That Ain’t Crazy: Kanye West and the Politics of Self-Diagnosis will be McCune’s third and final lecture on Yeezy, and will reportedly be about how he’s simultaneously both a “genius” and “crazy.”
According to Hypebeast, McCune will argue that we label Kanye as crazy because he acts outside the box we try to keep him in. “[U]ltimately what I’m getting at in this lecture is not just about Kanye, it’s also about the larger notion of crazy and how we utilize it,” the prof said. Furthermore, he says he plans to argue how race intensifies the label “crazy” as a mental illness versus the usage of “crazy” to refer to a type of innovator.
McCune explained his overall goal: “I want to give people permission to be enraged. Give people permission to be upset, to be angry, to be frustrated,” he said. “Give people permission to have moments where they break. Give people permission to have moments where they experience depression. I want to give them permission to have those moments without being characterized as being some type of deviant figure in the community. I don’t want to take away that experience and call it crazy. It’s reasonable. And it must be addressed with love, compassion, care, generosity.”
If you’re in the St. Louis area, and care at all, the lecture will be both free and open to the public. You can catch it this Wednesday, April 12, at 6 p.m.
