Sick Boi Analysis: Understanding Ren’s Journey

The Artist and the Illness

This Sick Boi analysis explores Ren Gill’s confrontation with Lyme disease and the healthcare system through the lens of 30 years in mental health nursing.

The Room Where It Happens

The song opens in a therapy room I know too well. After thirty years as a mental health nurse, I’ve sat in variations of this encounter thousands of times—sometimes as the clinician trying to help, sometimes as the professional who knows exactly where this conversation is heading and how inadequate our frameworks can be.

“Hi Ren, thank you for coming in today… Looking at your file here, it seems there’s a very apparent interplay with your emotional state and your physical body. Have you ever heard of the trauma response?”

It’s textbook stuff. Good practice, even. Psychoeducation, trauma-informed care, acknowledging the mind-body connection. The therapist explains negative feedback loops, how our subconscious repeats patterns from the past, how this “can have a pretty drastic effect on our biology.” Then comes the conclusion that I’ve heard clinicians deliver countless times, always well-intentioned, sometimes exactly right, and sometimes catastrophically wrong: “Essentially, your mind is making you sick.”

And that’s when Ren detonates.

Bitten By A Tick Boy

“Sick boy, sick boy, bitten by a tick boy”—this isn’t metaphor. Ren has Lyme disease, a diagnosis that often takes years to confirm, that creates a perfect storm of physical and neurological symptoms, and that many in the medical establishment still struggle to take seriously. When he follows with “looking for that fix boy, anabolic steroids, stem cell poster boy,” he’s documenting the desperate pharmaceutical carousel that defines chronic Lyme treatment.

I’ve watched this cycle destroy people. The initial antibiotics that don’t quite work. The experimental treatments. The side effects that create new problems requiring new medications. “Let’s see how you’re doing in another week or so / You’ll be feeling worse when the side effects will show”—this is the grinding reality of treating a condition that doesn’t respond cleanly to standard protocols.

De-realization, inflammation, dehydration, complications with medications, building up tolerations—these aren’t artistic flourishes. This is the daily experience of someone whose immune system is at war with itself, whose nervous system is under constant assault, whose cognition gets foggy and fractured. The medical term is “post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome” but that clinical language can’t capture what Ren does in one repeated phrase: “Drown sucker, drown.”

That repetition hits like a panic attack, like the suffocating feeling of treading water in your own malfunctioning body while everyone around you speaks in terminology that somehow makes the drowning worse. “I’ve been feeling like I’m drowning with my feet upon the ground / I’ve been screaming, I’ve been shouting, but I never make a sound.”

What Can You Tell Me About Your Childhood?

The therapist tries to dig deeper, looking for the psychological root cause. “What can you tell me about your childhood?” It’s standard trauma work—find the original wound, process it, release the pattern. Breathing exercises. Grounding techniques. “Tell me the first thing that comes to your mind.”

Here’s what I’ve learned after three decades in mental health: this moment, when a patient pauses and can’t access what you’re asking for, isn’t always resistance. Sometimes it’s genuine cognitive impairment from a physical condition. Sometimes it’s exhaustion at being asked, once again, to locate the problem inside themselves when their body is screaming that something external happened to them.

A tick bit him. That’s the childhood trauma—except it probably wasn’t childhood, and it’s not psychological trauma in the way the therapist means. It’s a spirochete bacteria boring into his nervous system, creating inflammation in his brain, affecting his mood regulation and cognitive function in ways that look like mental illness but have a microbial cause.

The Pivot

And then Ren flips the entire framework: “I feel like it’s not me, it’s the world that’s sick.”

In my career, I’ve learned to recognize this moment. It’s not denial. It’s not a patient being “difficult.” Sometimes it’s the most insightful thing someone can say—that their distress isn’t pathology, it’s accurate perception of a deeply disordered system. They’re seeing clearly, and what they see is unbearable.

“We’re given everything we need and we commoditize it / We consume, we destroy, like we’re parasitic / Science tells us that it’s suicide, and still we commit.” Ren refuses to be the sick one in a sick system. He won’t accept being pathologized while the world burns, while the same industry that will monetize his art will also monetize his illness.

“I’m not sick, we are sick, we are standing on a cliff / In the name of progress, we jump off the precipice / I’m not sick, I’m the virus, you’re the virus, hypocrite / How can you sit there with that smile on and tell me that I’m sick?”

It’s confrontational, yes. But after watching pharmaceutical companies profit from both the conditions that make people sick and the medications that treat them, after seeing how mental health itself has been commodified into wellness content and self-care products, after witnessing the healthcare system treat bodies like machines that just need the right adjustments—I understand his rage.

The Industry of Illness

“Record label meetings that commodify your gift, boy / Why you so upset? Don’t you wanna be a rich boy? / Fuck no, industry is cutthroat.” The same machinery that wants to package and sell his music is the same system that profits from his illness. Pills, treatment plans, therapy sessions, wellness retreats—it’s all another market. The ticker tape of symptoms becomes content. The struggle becomes brand.

What Ren captures brilliantly is how chronic illness under late capitalism creates an impossible bind: you need the system’s help to survive, but the system is structured to extract value from your suffering rather than end it. “I’ve been doing bits by myself swimming backstroke / Walking on a tightrope, rapping with a slit throat”—this is survival on the margins while the machinery grinds on.

The Bleeding

“Rape the Earth of all resources, and we bleed it for gold / And we bleed it for wealth, we bleed it for fame / But when you bleed it, can you tell me what the fuck will remain? / And I’m bleeding myself, I’m bleeding my brain / While I’m bleeding, I’m the reason ’cause I’m doing the same.”

That final admission is where Ren’s honesty cuts deepest. He’s not exempt. He’s creating content, building platforms, participating in the same extractive systems he’s critiquing. The awareness doesn’t free him from it. The tick that bit him is no different from humanity parasitically consuming the planet—we’re all infected, all complicit, all sick together.

As someone who spent a career in a healthcare system that genuinely tries to help people while operating within frameworks of insurance billing, pharmaceutical partnerships, and productivity metrics, I felt that admission in my bones. We do the best we can within systems we didn’t design, using tools that sometimes help and sometimes fall catastrophically short.

What The Vault Sees

Sick Boi isn’t a rejection of help—it’s a rejection of being reduced to a diagnosis while the systems causing harm remain unquestioned. It’s about the particular cruelty of having a physical illness that creates psychological symptoms, then being told your mind is making you sick. It’s about searching for healing in an industry structured to profit from chronic illness rather than cure it.

The therapist’s voice returns at the end, still gentle, still trying. And maybe that’s the tragedy—the care is real, the intention is good, but the framework can’t hold what Ren’s trying to say. The breathing exercises and childhood questions can’t address spirochete bacteria. The trauma-informed care can’t treat Lyme disease. The therapeutic relationship, no matter how skilled or compassionate, can’t fix what a tick did to his nervous system.

After thirty years in mental health, I understand both sides of that clinical encounter. The frustration of patients who know something is physically wrong but keep being directed to psychological explanations. The exhaustion of professionals trying to help within systems that constrain what help can look like. The moments when treatment feels like another system grinding you down rather than lifting you up.

Sick Boi lives in that impossible space—between individual suffering and collective sickness, between seeking help and recognizing the limits of what help can offer when you’re drowning with your feet on the ground, when you’re screaming but never making a sound, when the world itself feels like the pathology no therapy session can address.

The song doesn’t offer solutions. It offers witness. And sometimes, when you’re that sick, when you’ve been that dismissed, when you’ve navigated that many systems that couldn’t see you—being witnessed is its own form of medicine.