“I’m not crazy, I’m not smoking crack,” comedian Dave Chappelle tells Time magazine, addressing Entertainment Weekly’s report last week that the entertainer had checked himself into a mental health facility in South Africa.
“I’m not in a mental facility,” said Chappelle, who also said he did not have a drug problem but had consulted a psychiatrist for one 40-minute visit.
The 31-year-old said he was “definitely stressed out” and decided to stay with friends in Durban because he wasn’t happy with the direction of his Comedy Central series Chappelle’s Show, which recently saw the debut of the third season postponed indefinitely.
In describing the reason for his South African “spiritual retreat,” Chappelle says: “You hear so many voices jockeying for position in your mind that you want to make sure that you hear your own voice,” he said.
“So I figured, let me just cut myself off from everybody, take a minute and pull a Flintstone – stop a speeding car by using my bare feet as the brakes. There’s a lot of resistance to my opinions, so I decided, ‘Let me remove myself from this situation.”
Chappelle added, “If you don’t have the right people around you, and you’re moving at a million miles an hour, you can lose yourself.”