Vic Mensa on Men's Mental Health & Battling Addictions

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Transcript

00:00What's up? I'm Vic Mensah. I'm an artist and I'm here with Ebony.

00:03Chicago shapes my approach to community building in that it's a place of so much

00:12cultural currency and so much need at the same time. Chicago is an incredibly influential place

00:22and has shaped so many facets of culture from jazz and the blues to hip-hop and drill and

00:36Islam and literature and at the same time it's like an incredibly segregated

00:45impoverished city too you know it's full of this rich rich culture and a lot of poor poor people

00:59you know straight up like it's like that and so it gives you that perspective to see that

01:05you know there's always work to be done. I've just been studying social media and thinking about it

01:13differently and realizing how an artist and a following is a relationship and relationships

01:23are built on trust and communication and vulnerability and that's always been the

01:31underlying theme in my music or one of them and just recently I started putting it on social media

01:41and you know in an attempt to just strengthen and build the relationship you know and I've just

01:51found that it's been well received and beneficial for people. I think it is probably kind of a breath

01:59of fresh air sometimes for people to see like moments of reality and

02:05mental health is in many ways it's this great equalizer because it doesn't really matter who you are

02:15socioeconomically racially geographically

02:21um everyone deals with their mental health and interestingly the same things help and hurt

02:32everyone you know what I mean like addictions tear us all up and many of us seek pharmaceutical

02:44industry solutions and sometimes those help sometimes they don't um many of us seek meditation and

02:55you know spiritual paths those seem to help everybody sometimes people just seek religion that seems to help them

03:06um and uh like plant medicine is something I've been talking about a lot in my conversations on mental health

03:15because that's something that's been so beneficial for me and has you know helped me to

03:21be in this process of rewiring my brain because it's definitely still a process and it's like

03:27sometimes I'll be sitting there making a video about mental health and I'll be like

03:32you know my mental health don't feel great today

03:36it's not just coming from uh some like healed place it's just me sharing my daily process because

03:47every single day is a process and um some days are better than others but I do believe like when

03:53you lock in on you know certain um healthy behaviors that like the good days start to stack up

04:01you