In his apology letter published in The Wall Street Journal, in which he apologized to the Jewish community said his struggles with bipolar type-1 disorder impacted his behavior, the artist formerly known as Kanye West said that he suffered neurological damage in his near-fatal 2002 car crash.
“Twenty-five years ago, I was in a car accident that broke my jaw and caused injury to the right frontal lobe of my brain,” wrote Ye, who rapped about the car crash that left his jaw wired shut on his debut solo single, “Through the Wire.” “At the time the focus was on the visible damage—the fracture, the welling, and the immediate physical trauma. The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed.”
Ye claimed that comprehensive scans of his brain were not performed, and any neurological exams were limited. “The possibility of a frontal-lobe injury was never raised,” he wrote. “It wasn’t properly diagnosed until 2023. The medical oversight caused serious damage to my mental health and led to my bipolar type-1 diagnosis.”
While driving home from a recording studio in California in October 2002, Ye fell asleep behind the wheel and was in a devastating car crash.
He wrote about the car crash while recovering from his injuries on “Through the Wire,” which later appeared on his debut studio album, The College Dropout. The song served as his mainstream breakthrough after years of producing and writing for other artists, although he didn’t receive a writing credit due its sample of Chaka Khan’s “Through the Fire.”