Kanye West claims he suffers from a serious brain condition and apologizes for his behavior in recent years: “I lost touch with reality”

US rapper Kanye West (“Ye”) bought a full page in The Wall Street Journal on Monday to issue an official apology for the disturbing behavior that has made him an outcast in recent years. He said he is undergoing treatment for a brain condition after last year he suffered “a four-month manic episode with psychotic, paranoid and impulsive behavior that destroyed my life,” reports Variety.

Writing about his manic state in 2025 and noting that he “hit rock bottom a few months ago,” West said, “As the situation became more and more unsustainable, there were times when I didn't want to be here anymore.”

West, who legally changed his name to “Ye” in 2021, addressed his history of anti-Semitic tirades, pro-Hitler statements and adoption of the swastika in his wide-ranging statement. He blamed his hate speech on the fact that he had “lost touch with reality”.

“I regret and am deeply ashamed of my actions in that state and I am committed to taking responsibility, treatment and real change. However, that does not excuse what I did. I am not a Nazi and I am not anti-Semitic. I love Jewish people,” he wrote.

The statement comes ahead of the release of 48-year-old West's long-delayed album 'Bully'. It was due to be released on Spotify on Friday.

Kanye West claims he was left with a brain injury after a car accident

The wide-ranging statement begins with Ye addressing “those I have hurt.” He then discusses the car accident he was involved in a quarter of a century ago, shortly before his rise to stardom. He says he then suffered a frontal lobe injury that wasn't properly diagnosed until 2023.

He claims the injury was the cause of his bipolar disorder – a diagnosis he once accepted, then dismissed as false including last year, but now accepts again.

“You feel like you're seeing the world more clearly than ever, when in reality you're completely out of control… The scariest thing about this disorder is how convincing it is when it tells you: you don't need help,” the rapper wrote in the statement published by the WSJ. “It blinds you, but it makes you think you have discernment. You feel strong, confident, unstoppable. I've lost touch with reality,” he claims.

Variety magazine recalls that in recent years, Ye had claimed that he did not suffer from bipolar disorder, but from a form of autism; now he says it was the doctors who told him he was autistic and not bipolar. He says he came to understand what he was really going through by reading Reddit forums about the brain condition and getting help at the urging of his wife. West married Australian model Bianca Censori in December 2022 in a private, unofficial ceremony after his ex-wife Kim Kardashian filed for divorce the previous year.

Rapper Says Injury Caused Bipolar Disorder and 'Manic Episodes'

“Having bipolar disorder means a permanent state of mental illness. When you're in a manic episode, you're sick in that moment. When you're not in an episode, you're completely 'normal'. And that's when the remnants of the destruction left by the illness hit the hardest. After hitting rock bottom a few months ago, my wife encouraged me to finally seek help,” wrote Kanye West.

Variety also points out that this is not the first time the rapper has apologized for anti-Semitic statements, although the new statement is the longest and perhaps the most significant. He previously expressed regret for threatening to go into “Death-con 3” (an apparent reference to the US military's alert DEFCON) against Jews, only to appear to change his mind by continuing to sell swastika T-shirts and record a song titled “Heil Hitler” to further antagonize Jews and others he considered allies against him.

The song “Heil Hitler” made a topical comeback in the United States just last week after a Miami nightclub drew backlash for playing the incendiary song while Nick Fuentes, a self-proclaimed anti-Semite and white supremacist, and brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate were in the club. According to witnesses, some customers began chanting the song's title and raising their arms as if for a Nazi salute.