1-800-273-8255

For as much flak as Logic took — and probably still takes — for his earnest 2017 suicide prevention anthem “1-800-273-8255,” it turns out that the song was actually pretty effective in its stated purpose, according to a study in The BMJ (British Medical Journal). While correlation by no means equals causation, the study found that during three key periods of the song’s popularity, suicide rates among 10- to 19-year-olds in the US dropped by 5.5 percent. A corresponding model of the same time periods in different years shows that this comes out to about 245 fewer suicides.

The three periods examined included the first 34 days after the song’s release, after Logic’s 2017 MTV VMAs performance, and after his 2018 Grammy Awards performance. The study also found that the number of calls made to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, from which the song takes its title, rose by 6.9 percent, or 9,915 more calls than usual — something that was reported previously but bears repeating.

The study’s author, Thomas Niederkrotenthaler, an associate professor in the department of social and preventive medicine at the Medical University of Vienna, Austria, told CNN, “Celebrities but also non-celebrities can have an important role in suicide prevention if they communicate about how they have coped with crisis situations and suicidal ideation.” Meanwhile, Logic himself seemed pretty enthused about the analysis, saying, “To know that my music was actually affecting people’s lives, truly, that’s what inspired me to make the song. We did it from a really warm place in our hearts to try to help people. And the fact that it actually did — that blows my mind.”

Logic, who recently returned to rap after retiring to become a professional gamer, is set to release his second book next week, a memoir titled The Bright Future. Today, GQ published an excerpt from the upcoming tome, a chapter in which Logic addresses the impact of — and the backlash against — his suicide awareness mega-hit “1-800-273-8255.” The track, which earned him a Grammy nomination in 2017 but also resulted in what he called the “lowest point” of his life in a recent interview, was the smash hit he thought he’d been looking for his whole career. Instead, it brought him to the brink with hateful comments from both fans and peers after his record-breaking performance of the song on the 2018 MTV VMAs.

The song and I were both trending on Twitter the entire night and the entire next day. Within hours the video was getting millions of views on YouTube. Everyone was talking about it on every entertainment show, every celebrity gossip blog, everywhere. It was a life-changing moment. Ellen even invited me on Ellen, and I’d wanted to go on fucking Ellen for years. I got all the press I’d ever dreamed of. I got a hit song bigger than any hit song I’d ever even imagined I would have.

… It felt good to feel good enough. It lasted at least a good twenty- four hours or so, and that’s when I got hit with a wave of hate unlike anything I’d ever experienced in my life.

The blowback and abuse I’d experienced in the wake of the VMAs was like nothing I’d ever experienced. Everything I’d seen up to that point was mild in comparison. It was a tsunami of hate, and I couldn’t turn it off.

Or, more accurately, I couldn’t not turn it on. Nobody was making me check my phone except me, but I couldn’t put it down. It was like the fucking thing was glued in my hand. I’d wake up and check it first thing. I’d eat my morning cereal looking at it. I’d take my morning shit looking at it. Lenny would drive me to the studio and I’d be looking at it. I’d go in to record, come out for a smoke break, and look at it. It was every day, because this thing in my hand was like my home. It was where I lived, in this world of the RattPack and all my friends online. I didn’t know how not to be there. Only my home had gone from the place where I was loved to the place where I was hated. The love was all still there, of course, but I was so accustomed to it that for the most part it faded into the background. All I could see was the hate.

Logic explains that even his longtime supporters turned on him because of the sense that he was “too mainstream,” and how the resulting depression sapped his enjoyment of the tour for Everybody, the album from which the song hailed. Even among those who felt that the song helped them, the impact led to a deluge of painful revelations that Logic absorbed for the better part of a year. He notes that he even contemplated a fatal solution for himself but that prospect of becoming “a meme about how the Suicide Guy killed himself” took that option off the table.

It’s a stark look into the negative aspects of fame, how fans’ habit of dehumanizing stars for the sake of jokes and gossip has real-world impacts on the people at the center of pop culture. It’s a reminder to be kind, because you never know what someone is going through on the other side of that screen.

The Bright Future will be out 9/7 via Simon And Schuster Publishing.