Kayne West Just Opened up About Being "Handcuffed" and "Drugged" During Bipolar "Episode"

• In a new episode of David Letterman's My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman, Kanye West opened up about his experience with bipolar disorder.
• West was diagnosed two years ago.

Kanye West is one of the guests on David Letterman's upcoming season of My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, and during a teaser for his episode, West opened up about his bipolar disorder diagnosis and what he wants people to know about living with bipolar.

He talked about what happens when he doesn't take medication. "If you don’t take medication every day to keep you at a certain state, you have a potential to ramp up and it can take you to a point where you can even end up in the hospital," he said, according to Entertainment Tonight. "And you start acting erratic, as TMZ would put it."

When he becomes "erratic," he explained it causes him to "ramp up." "When you ramp up, it expresses your personality more. You can become almost more adolescent in your expression," he said. "This is my specific experience that I’ve had over the past two years, because I’ve only been diagnosed for two years now."

West has suffered bipolar "episodes" that have landed him in the hospital, and he said that in his experience, he gets paranoid about everything and starts to second-guess who people are. People are now actors, and everything's a "conspiracy." He starts to think the government is putting chips in his head. He feels like he's being recorded.

"You have this moment [where] you feel everyone wants to kill you. You pretty much don’t trust anyone," he said.

By speaking out about this, he said he hopes hospitals reevaluate how they treat patients with mental disorders.

"They have this moment where they put you—they handcuff you, they drug you, they put you on the bed, and they separate you from everyone you know," West said. "That’s something that I am so happy that I experienced myself so I can start by changing that moment. When you are in that state, you have to have someone you trust. It is cruel and primitive to do that."

He also hopes that his honesty about his own bipolar can help people recognise that maybe some of their favourite artists and creators also struggle from mental health issues.

"That’s just the reality. If you want these crazy ideas and these crazy stages, this crazy music and this crazy way of thinking, there’s a chance it might come from a crazy person," he said.