Jeezy opened up about his battle with depression in his new memoir Adversity For Sale: Ya Gotta Believe. The multi-platinum-selling rapper discussed the book and his mental health in an interview with Vulture.
“I didn’t always have the wording or the tools to understand what I was going through,” he said. “So as mental health became a topic of conversation, I started to learn and dive into how that could affect me. Because I felt like if I can do that, then I can take what I’ve learned and pass it to my culture. As a Black man, we don’t really lean into that because we’re taught that’s weak. I was depressed, my mental health was off, and I went on the journey, and I’m still on the journey. Today, I can say that I’m honestly in a better place.”
Jeezy thought it was important to cover the topic of mental health in his book. He shared his story to encourage others who might be wary of counseling or therapy.
“You can have all the money in the world, but if your mental health ain’t right, you’re not going to be able to enjoy it the way you want to enjoy it, and you’re going to spiral out of control,” he said. “I just want to put that in the book in a way that people can look at it and see the trauma in it, and then they wouldn’t look at it as weakness. They would look at it as, ‘I need to take a page out of Jeezy’s book because I’m going through these same issues.’”
Jeezy’s Adversity For Sale dropped in August. He narrated the audiobook version of the memoir, which was published by HarperCollins.