Modern Arabic popular music is rarely concerned with the noise inside.
For decades, singers and songwriters across the region have written about heartbreak, love, longing and faith, but rarely about depression, anxiety or what it means to keep going in an uncertain world.
This gap informed my year-long Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. I wanted to understand how musicians in the Arab world are beginning to use their work to talk about mental health. The idea was not to create a campaign or make a moral point, but to record a quiet shift already happening.
Palestinian-Jordanian rapper Laith Al Husseini, known as The Synaptik, tells me music became his way of keeping it together while living through the Israel-Gaza war. Speaking from Ramallah, where distant bombardment sometimes reaches his village, he describes the feeling of releasing his album Al Taman while welcoming new life amid mass fatalities.
"Ever since the war, I have been staying home with the family. You cannot move more than five kilometres. But despite all that, I feel deeply happy inside because I have my first-born son here with me,” he reflects. “I move between fear and loss, and then this sense of inner peace and hope."
His 2018 track, Ritalin, was one of the first Arabic songs to name a mental health condition directly. "From a young age, I have been dealing with depression and anxiety, as well as the side effects of medication," he tells me. "I wrote the song because I was tired of doing it in silence. I did not know it would resonate with so many people. It helped others unburden that secret, which is really crushing."
Many of these exchanges felt a little like therapy sessions rather than run-of-the-mill interviews. Artists spoke slowly, with pauses that did not need to be filled, moments you can hear in some of the episodes featuring them on The National's podcast, Tarab.
Palestinian singer Lina Makoul tells me her latest single Radiya, meaning "being content", was her way of finding emotional balance during destruction. The song is unusual as contentment rarely appears in Arabic pop as it doesn't provide the emotional crescendo audiences expect.
But Makoul transformed it into a pulsating dance-pop single and form of resistance. "Every time I felt like something was not working out for me, I would repeat it like a mantra: 'I am content with whatever comes. I know I am divinely protected.'"
Anthony Khoury of Lebanese band Adonis explains his recent lyrics explore preservation. Their album Wedyan, recorded during the 2024 invasion of Lebanon, was intentionally detached from conflict. "We were devastated during the war," he says. "But the music was elsewhere. It did not sit with us in that dark place. We needed to protect something. Maybe our joy, our creativity, maybe even our sanity."
That desire to protect inner space runs through Lebanese singer Tania Saleh's album Fragile, written after leaving the economic decay of Beirut for a new life in Paris. "I could not take my house with me," she tells me. "I took maybe my Joni Mitchell CDs, a book or two, and I just closed the door behind me and left. If I stayed in Lebanon by myself, I would rot slowly. Emotionally, at least."
"I love Paris," she says, "but I always feel like something is missing. The warmth, the weather, the details of life in Lebanon. When I do not have anything to do, the emotions creep in and eat me from the inside. That is why I run to creativity, to avoid the news, to avoid reality, to keep going."
Bachir Ramadan, the Lebanese metal drummer who survived the 2020 Beirut port explosion, lives in Doha and will be releasing a memoir about surviving the tragedy, titled Obsidian Tempo this month. "I never meant to write a book," he says. "But being away from the drums, I needed another outlet. When I got to the chapter about August 4, it hit me hard. It was painful to write, but it felt like therapy. Actually, better than therapy."
If artists are willing to talk about mental health, what is the industry doing to support them? Independent Arab artists live with a double burden - financial precariousness without major-label backing, as well as the strain of conflict and displacement. These pressures make support systems necessary.
We treat music as entertainment and business, not as potential therapy. While great strides are being made in professionalising the industry, particularly through creating royalty payment systems and connecting with government ministries, the region needs other equally important partnerships – mentorship programmes pairing established musicians with emerging ones facing burnout, and workshops within festivals where artists can discuss exhaustion openly.
The work I undertook in my fellowship year was an attempt to document this shift. And while the year may be over, these conversations continue to shape my reporting. I hope this work serves as a reference point for future artists, journalists and organisations to dig deeper.
Saeed Saeed is a 2024-25 Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow
