Story time:

I'm currently a second year graduate student studying theoretical chemistry at a big R1 university. There was this one guy who entered my program when I did, we'll call him Bill.

Bill was a cool dude. He always knew where the party was at, he was always willing to get a drink after work, and he was just an all around fun guy. Then about halfway through our first year, Bill started to post some really weird shit to Facebook. Lots of non-sequitars, lots of reference to old relationships, and a lot of inappropriate posts featuring a massive amount of capitalization.

We fell out of touch because of finals and whatnot, but all of a sudden Bill was no longer on campus. Then one day, I get an email from him. No words in the body of the email but there was an audio file attached. It was a recording of him being arrested and then taken to a mental hospital where he remained for almost a year.

The story has a happy ending because he's back here now and doing well, but Kanye's tweets leading up to the release of TLOP have almost perfectly mirrored Bill's behavior before he was institutionalized. I really hope Kanye has people around him who care about him and don't just assume that he's an eccentric because, from 30,000 feet, it seems like he's under significant duress. If the debt stuff is true, there's even more reason to be concerned. Again, I'm not a therapist, and I'm not actually there. This could all be a big publicity stunt to push Tidal and TLOP, but it really is eerie how similar his behavior is to how my friend was when he had a psychotic break. Grad school ain't as stressful as releasing an album, but it sure is similar.