This article touches on suicide and other difficult topics, which some may find upsetting.
YouTuber Jake Paul has opened up about experiencing suicidal ideations in the aftermath of the controversial video his older brother Logan uploaded in the Aokigahara forest back in December 2017.
On December 31, 2017, Logan, 26, posted a video taken at the Aokigahara forest, perhaps better known as suicide forest, which is located along the edge of Mount Fuji.
The forest is notorious for being a place where people often head to in order to commit suicide and the video uploaded by Logan appeared to show the body of a man who had done so.
At the time of the backlash, Logan posted an apology video and also wrote a tweet saying that he was "misguided by shock and awe".
However, it appears that the outrage that the footage sparked also affected his younger brother Jake.
In an 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? It was just by way of association, because my brother filmed in the suicide forest, my life was pretty much ruined. YouTube demonetized 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 continued: "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.
"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 said: "Yeah, 100 percent."
However, he eventually managed to overcome his suicidal thoughts, explaining: "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."