Traumatized Joost Klein begged a mental health institution for help

Never talks about private life

Until a few years ago, he came to my house a lot,” media phenomenon Johan Vlemmix tells Story about Joost Klein, who hopes to win the Eurovision Song Contest with his song Europapa. ‘I helped him and his friends make music videos. It was a treat to be in a room with him.” What surprised Johan at the time was that Joost never talked about his private life. ‘Nothing! I’ve never seen him with a girlfriend either. I have often accompanied that group to its performances. When it came to his creativity, he was unstoppable. He kept quiet about the other things in his life. About his brother and sister, his parents, any women in his life… I never saw him with a woman either.’

Parents died

Joost, who started his soon popular YouTube channel EenhoornJoost as a 10-year-old and released his first EP Homeless in 2016, does tell a lot about his life in his lyrics. He does not hide the fact that this was a struggle for a long time. Joost was bullied at school in the Frisian village where he grew up. As a twelve-year-old boy, he was then struck by enormous tragedy when his father Hans and his mother Ella died a year apart. In songs, Joost candidly talks about how he looked at his father when he died and how he found his mother on the couch after she had a heart attack. Initially, his sister Nanda and brother Hugo, who was approximately fifteen years older, took care of Joost after the death of their parents. He later ended up in a host family and then ended up in a crisis shelter.

Traumas

He managed to get his life back on track, but a few years ago he still fell into a black hole. He went looking for help and turned to the GGZ. “I had been emailing and calling for months, but you end up on a waiting list that is getting longer and longer,” he said a year and a half ago in the radio program 3voor12. Joost eventually ended up in Trauma Center Netherlands. ‘You can discuss certain traumas very specifically, you choose one or two traumas as if they were Pokémon cards and discuss them. Very intense. In such a center you receive, for example, body therapy and EMDR. Only since then have I understood the word ‘processing’.