Trevor Mills never spends a day without thinking about his big brother’s suicide.

Mills’ brother took his own life 18 months ago, after a seven-year struggle with undiagnosed mental illness.

But Mills isn’t dwelling on the past. He’s building on it.

“He inspires me a lot,” Mills said about his lost brother. “He was a very kind, positive person, so it’s not a bad thing that I think about him everyday.”

Last year, on Bell Let’s Talk Day, Mills released a video of himself rapping about mental health while walking in an alley in Vancouver. He wasn’t expecting the video to find a broad audience, but it did.

“At first it was cathartic, and it felt good for me,” Mills said of the rap he performed in the video. “What started happening was a lot of people were saying how much it resonated with them, and while that was occurring, it was encouraging me to perform it more.”

Eventually, he was invited to perform the rap at the Kettle Friendship Society as part of an event on mental health headlined by former Olympian Clara Hughes. He came to see his rapping as a way to raise money and awareness.

Fundraisers featuring his rap have raised more than $25,000 for mental health initiatives in Vancouver.

A communications teacher at Kitsilano Secondary School, Mills now uses rap to get his students to open up about the stigma of mental illness.

During a recent class, a student named Ida came up with a lyric that encapsulates the message that Mills hopes to get across:

"Everybody's somebody, and nobody's nothing, everything can be anything, so make yourself something.”

Now, Mills is hoping to take that message -- and its fundraising power -- further by recording a 7-song album, partial proceeds of which will be donated to the Vancouver General Hospital Mental Health Foundation.

“I think that its rawness really touched people,” Mills said of his rap from last year. “I wanted to attach an entire project behind it of music that comes from that place but is solution-focused.”

Mills has plans to release videos to accompany the songs as well, and has raised more than $8,500 through Kickstarter toward producing them.

To learn more about the album, which is called “Evidence of a Struggle,” visit Mills’ Kickstarter page here.