Your Favorite Artists Are Rapping About Therapy

“Oh, this the part where mental stability meets talent.” – Kendrick Lamar

Since rappers first started rocking mics, they’ve rhymed about the challenges they face due to systemic oppression and socio-political inequalities, overcoming those obstacles through grit, tenacity, and mental fortitude. Rap is poetry, after all—naturally expressive and deeply emotional at its core.

However, artists have historically been more inclined to dissect the outside world than to analyze how these traumatic, life-altering events have impacted their own mental health. For some, to dive too deep into your own emotional wellbeing runs the risk of being considered “soft.” 

Going to therapy, specifically, is a topic that many artists have shied away from in their music—until recently. One of the most visible examples of a superstar rapper addressing therapy on an album was Jay-Z on 4:44, where he faced his infidelity, familial trauma, and ego head-on. “My therapist said I relapsed,” Hov raps on “Smile,” a song about his mother discovering her sexuality. Now, nearly five years later, two of rap’s biggest stars have openly rapped about the benefits of going to therapy (Drake in his verse on Jack Harlow’s “Churchill Downs” and Kendrick throughout his new album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers) during Mental Health Awareness Month. This represents a big step forward when it comes to breaking down the stigmas surrounding mental health.

The thematic structure of Kendrick’s Mr. Morale is centered around therapy sessions where he unpacks pivotal moments in his life that impacted who he is today. It takes bravery to rap about these revelations, especially issues like his unhealthy addiction to sex, “daddy issues,” and how his mother being abused affected his own outlook on the world. Mr. Morale isn’t overwhelmingly esoteric like some of Kendrick’s previous work, giving him a chance to lay his issues out in plain terms and reveal how therapy helped him get here.

A week prior, on Jack Harlow’s new song “Churchill Downs,” Drake opens his guest verse by rapping, “Cold hearts and heated floors/ No parental guidance, I just see divorce/ Therapy session, I’m in the waiting room reading Forbes/ Abandonment issues I’m getting treated for.” Since the beginning of his career, Drake has been more transparent and vulnerable than many of his rap peers (so much so that he was labeled “soft” early in his career), but this verse marks a significant moment where he directly addresses the help he’s received from therapy to resolve deeper familial issues.

Kendrick and Drake aren’t the only modern-day hip-hop artists that discuss deeply personal topics in their music, but why is it so rare to hear artists rap about issues like unpacking trauma through therapy? IDK might have the answer. As the Maryland rapper tells Complex, “Vulnerability is really a key to happiness—being able to be vulnerable and talk about things. The thing that gets in the way of that, though, is shame. If you can get past that idea of being ashamed, you’ll realize very quickly that more people relate to your problems than not.”

Like Kendrick and Drake, IDK is another artist who has used therapy to help reconcile deep childhood traumas, which he raps about in his music. Throughout his 2021 album USEE4YOURSELF, he tackled deeply personal subject matter, like his aunt molesting him as a child and grappling with his stepfather infecting his mother with AIDS, which would eventually kill her. IDK believes that the reason why it’s difficult for other male artists to discuss their own traumas is because of the stigmas surrounding mental health in the Black community, and how that stems from toxic masculinity and the constant need to be strong.

“I think, for men in particular, our masculinity is based on how strong we appear, physically and mentally,” he says. “The idea of a ‘strong man’ is that he’s able to get through certain pains and struggles, and things that he goes through mentally without complaining…the stigma around [therapy] is, if you express how you feel, you come off as weak.”

Some of the longest-held stigmas around therapy itself derive from the Black community having a lack of access to practical mental health treatments. Psychiatric treatments were not readily available for many Black people until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when Samuel Cartwright’s discriminatory reports about African Americans having “child-like emotional processes” in the 19^th century were finally challenged. Then, thanks to redlining and predatory housing policies around the same time, many Black people did not have access to psychiatric clinics and facilities that could properly treat them anywhere near their communities. In 2018, it was also reported that 11.5% of Black Americans had no form of health insurance.