Let’s talk about it

Money does not make you immune to mental health struggles. There have been wealthy, successful, multimillionaire public figures who still lost their lives to suicide, people like Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, and Robin Williams, all financially successful, all admired, all still human. I am not speaking on Kai Cenat’s personal situation because I only watched a portion of the video and cannot speak on what he is personally experiencing, but what I will speak on is the mindset in the comment above that suggests someone cannot be depressed or struggle mentally because they have money or success. That is not how depression works. People often attach happiness and emotional stability to things outside of themselves. They attach it to money, to bank accounts, to status, to support, to visibility, but have you ever noticed that when people lose the money, lose the status, lose the support, lose the visibility, and lose the things they believe make them happy, they begin to struggle emotionally or fall apart completely. That alone tells us happiness was never embodied within them to begin with. Money can bring access, comfort, and relief from lack, but it does not automatically bring peace. Mental health is about the mind, the nervous system, identity, pressure, trauma, and lived experience, and those things do not disappear once a certain financial status is reached. There are people who become rich and later discover they are struggling with schizophrenia, severe depression, anxiety, or other mental health conditions because money does not erase mental illness, it only removes the struggle of not having enough. Many people chase money believing it will make them whole, only to reach it and realize it did not heal their internal world. Happiness is something you embody on your own when you are alone, when you are struggling, when you are moving through hardship. Success is something you embody on your own when nothing external is validating you and you are still standing. Some of the happiest people you will ever meet are those who feel abundant without money because they do not outsource their worth or stability to external things. And we also cannot ignore the reality of being a young, Black, successful man in America in a system that does not protect you, under constant pressure to perform, grow, stay relevant, stay aligned, and become more while being publicly scrutinized. That weight does not disappear because the bank account is full. Mental health and money go hand in hand, but success does not cancel humanity, and awareness begins when we stop invalidating people’s pain based on what we think they should be able to handle