"I wanted to be a rapper, but you know parents – they turned me into a psychiatrist”

“I wanted to be a rapper, but you know parents – they turned me into a psychiatrist”, said Dr Akeem Sule as he opened the Hip Hop Psych event at the swanky new ORTUS building with a rap. Yes, a rap. A real psychiatrist did a real rap in Demark Hill. Thank God for that, I thought as the thoroughly enjoyable evening ensued; a generation of rapping psychiatrists has been born. This is the world of mental health I want to be a part of.

Hip Hop Psych is an initiative that was co-founded by Dr Akeem Sule and Dr Becky Inkster, to present the portrayal of mental health in hip hop. First and foremost they are two bona fide professional scientists who just happen to have a zeal for hip hop and rap music, and have combined their respective knowledge and expertise to expose and examine the true prevalence of mental health issues ranging from addiction to borderline personality disorder in the vast majority of hip hop lyrics.

They lead a jovial, diverse audience through a selection of their favourite raps, by artists such as Eminem, J. Cole and 2Pac, the latter being Akeem’s favourite and whom he sported on his t-shirt; no white coats here. As they played us the beats, they stopped to break down the lyrics, and to understand what kinds of conditions and disorders were being conveyed, sometimes to the oblivion on the artist themselves. Most were spot-on detections but some were rather tenuous links and speculations about the neuropsychiatric states of some of the artists.

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The co-founders were impressive, and were by no means amateurs in either field of rap or psychiatry. On the contrary, Akeem is a Consultant Psychiatrist in general adult psychiatry with the South Essex Partnership and an Honorary Visiting Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. Dr Becky Inkster is a clinical neuroscientist, and Project Manager for a large scale Wellcome Trust award called NeuroScience in Psychiatry Network (NSPN), so she brought lots of genetic and epidemiological insight about the lyrics to the table.

There is often a tendency for collaborations or initiatives between evidence-based research and the arts to not really achieve very much, and that’s because it’s a pretty difficult thing to do. To use music and the arts to understand things like mental health, especially for a specific demographic type, is risky because people who are too involved in either the arts or the science often do the translational work.

However, despite this duo clearly being more authoritative in the science department, this didn’t undermine their passion for the vehicle through which they examined the topic of mental health. I just wanted to know more about how their insight could be used to actually reform mental health services, especially in a clinical setting.

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