Charles Hamilton: 'I wanted to commit suicide

Billboard exclusively spoke with the prodigiously talented rapper Charles Hamilton, who opened up about his struggle with mental illness, and how he went from stardom to homelessness, incarceration and institutionalization in little more than year.

"I wanted to commit career suicide, physical suicide, spiritual suicide -- I didn't care anymore," says Hamilton.

In 2008 Hamilton blew up the blogosphere with a prolific series of dozens of out-there and sometimes brilliant mixtapes that led to a seven-figure deal with Interscope, personally brokered by Jimmy Iovine.

But behind the scenes, things were unraveling. Hamilton was suffering from an undiagnosed bipolar disorder; he was starting to act erratically, cutting himself off from friends and family.

"I just didn't trust anybody," he says. "I didn't leave my house, I just made music all the time. I was fighting depression -- I shut myself in." ​

Hamilton's mother, Talise Moorer, realized something wasn't right with her son. After discovering him living in an abandoned building in Staten Island and telling friends he was going to jump off Macomb's Dam Bridge in Harlem, she thought might lose her son forever.

"I thought my son was going to die," says Moorer. "He didn't look like my child. He looked like an alien. He was just not there."