WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS POTENTIALLY DISTRESSING CONTENT ABOUT SUICIDE
Jake Paul has opened up about the suicidal thoughts he experienced after feeling 'cancelled' as a result of a controversial video posted by his brother in December 2017.
Older sibling Logan, 26, posted a vlog on 31 December at the Aokigahara forest (otherwise known as 'suicide forest') which is located at the base of Mount Fuji.
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The area is a known site where people go to to take their own lives and the clip showed the body of someone who is believed to have done that.
Logan issued an apology video and also posted on Twitter saying he was 'misguided by shock and awe', but it seems that the backlash that followed didn't only impact him but also those close to him as well.
During a recent interview with Graham Bensinger, Jake Paul, 24, said: "Every brand that I was affiliated with dropped me. I wasn't even the one who filmed the video, right?
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"It was just by way of association, because my brother filmed in the suicide forest, my life was pretty much ruined. YouTube demonetised me.
"Every brand dropped me. I had a $10 million deal with Target that was gonna go live, like seven days from that - they dropped me. Everything just went downhill."
He went on to say: "I'm sitting there at 21, I lose basically all my income because of what my brother did. I'm blacklisted, I'm not in the community anymore.
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"We got canceled everywhere. And so I just saw everything in my life was just falling apart and the only thing that made me forget it was drinking and smoking weed, that only makes it worse, right? Because you're using a crutch to get by.
"You sort of wake up one day and I'm in this empty house, with everything that I had built basically stripped away from me and people hated me.
"I thought my own friends - who I thought I would be with and know forever - they were gone.
"And I was like, ‘What's the purpose of my life? This sucks. This is terrible. I wanna run away.’ And I think dark thoughts come into your head of like… ‘I don't wanna be here on Earth anymore.’"
When Bensinger asked: "Did you think about taking your own life?" Paul responded: "Yeah, 100 percent."
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Speaking about how he got through it, he went on: "I was like 'this is exactly what everyone wants', the media wants to see me fail and I'm not going to give them what they want.
"I just made the decision to wake up every day and change my attitude really."
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Featured Image Credit: YouTube/Graham Bensinger