Kanye West Says His 2002 Car Accident Caused Significant Damage to His Brain

Ye, aka Kanye West, is one of the wealthiest artists in the industry. His career has expanded from rap, writing, and producing to entrepreneurship and using his platform to discuss topics he's passionate about, including religion and politics. Both topics have landed Ye in hot water, forcing some circles to cancel him and remove him from their playlists altogether.

In January 2026, Ye addressed his toughest critics in an apologetic full-page ad he placed in The Wall Street Journal. While apologizing for his past anti-semitic rants, the rapper shared how his 2002 car accident forever changed his behavior.

Whether you embrace him now for who he is or find yourself reminiscing about "the old Ye," most people who have followed Ye's career know he was involved in a car accident that he credits for changing the trajectory of his career. The crash happened in 2002, just two weeks after Ye inked his first recording deal with Roc-A-Fella Records.

According to his account of the accident that he shared in his documentary, Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy, per PopSugar, he was on his way home from a Los Angeles, Calif. studio when he crashed his car after falling asleep at the wheel. Ye said the accident caused significant damage to his jaw, and he had to have it wired shut. However, two weeks after the accident, he wrote his debut single, "Through the Wire," against doctors' orders.

"I used this entire album as my rehabilitation," Ye said of working on the song and his first album, The College Dropout, while healing. "Instead of staying at the hotel, I snuck in and made songs that inspired me. Songs that gave me life. I feel like this album was kind of like my angel that helped heal me. It revived my spirits."

While Ye said his car accident helped him achieve the success he had been searching for after years of writing for other artists, it also significantly changed the way he sees the world. In his January 2026 apology letter, he wrote that the accident resulted in him living with cognitive issues.

"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,” he explained. “At the time the focus was on the visible damage—the fracture, the swelling, and the immediate physical trauma. The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed.”

Ye said his doctors never explored if the accident caused a "frontal-lobe injury," and he wasn't properly diagnosed with the injury until 2023, which "caused serious damage to my mental health and led to my bipolar type-1 diagnosis.”

The "Heartless" rapper also stated in 2023 that he believed his accident could've contributed to him showing "signs of autism." In screenshots of texts between Ye and Elon Musk that were posted to X (formerly Twitter), he said he believed he was misdiagnosed with bipolar type-1 disorder, which he was diagnosed with in 2016.

“When are we going to speak,” Ye texted the X CEO. “You owe me nothing. You never have to speak to me again. But if we do speak. The nature of the relationship has to change. I’m not bipolar. I have signs of autism from my car accident. You can’t watch Kim keep my kids from me. And not say anything publicly and then call yourself my friend so I can bring my audience to your struggling platform.”

In his apology in The Wall Street Journal, Ye stated he has bipolar type-1 disorder and shared how he experienced four-month manic episodes that altered his behavior.

"Bipolar disorder comes with its own defense system," he wrote. "Denial. When you're manic, you don't think you're sick. You think everyone else is overreacting. You feel like you're seeing the world more clearly than ever, when in reality you're losing your grip entirely."