What Does Hospitalized For Exhaustion Mean? Surprising Cause Of Kanye West's Psychiatric Evaluation
Shortly after Kanye West ended his Saint Pablo tour in Los Angeles, he was reportedly admitted to UCLA’s Medical Center for what is being called an “emergency psychiatric evaluation.” With the remaining dates of West’s national tour abruptly canceled, the LAPD received a disturbance call from a home at 4:20 p.m. Eastern time on Monday. West was then taken to be treated for exhaustion and further assessment, according to CNN.
The hospitalization followed a week of bizarre public behavior from West, including political rants about his support for Donald Trump and hate for Jay Z, Beyoncé, and Mark Zuckerberg in the middle of his last concert where he was booed. According to sources, the decision to hospitalize West was for his own health and safety, citing exhaustion, stress, and sleep deprivation as the main causes.
If West wasn’t getting adequate sleep, coupled with stress and exhaustion, it could cause unusual mood and behavioral problems, according to the National Sleep Foundation. However, sleep problems could also indicate the opposite. Psychologist Matthew Walker of the University of California says, “almost all psychiatric disorders show some problems with sleep.” For West, did a psychiatric disorder follow sleep problems, or was it the other way around?
In 2015, Walker and his team recruited 18 healthy adults and studied their brain scans after they pulled all-nighters or clocked in a full night’s sleep. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found those who were awake for 24 hours and sleep deprived were unable to differentiate friendly facial expressions from threatening ones. The functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans revealed that sleep deprivation made it difficult for the brain’s emotional processing center to work normally.
“Sleep deprivation appears to dislocate the body from the brain,” Walker said in a statement. “Insufficient sleep removes the rose tint to our emotional world, causing an overestimation of threat.”
So what did happen to West? Did sleep deprivation cause him to lose control of his emotional processing center? His abnormal behavior leading up to the hospitalization may be signs of a sleep-deprived brain coupled with the stress of his tour. West’s mother-in-law Kris Jenner spoke to news magazine Extra about his condition, offering a possible cause for medical concern:
"He's exhausted. He's just really tired," Jenner said. "He's had a grueling tour and it's been a grind, so he just needs to rest."
West could also be reacting to a recent incident in which his wife, Kim Kardashian, was robbed in her hotel room in Paris. Kardashian says she was threatened with a gun and "robbed of millions of dollars worth of jewelry by armed and masked assailants," according to USA Today. The couple reportedly has been under heavy stress since the incident, the Daily Mail reported.