#Brandy talks Kanye, Whitney and her first album in eight years

When she was still a teenager, Brandy playfully engaged in a catfight with Monica on their 1998 smash “The Boy Is Mine.”

But the now 41-year-old singer digs into deeper emotional territory on her haunting new single, “Borderline,” which examines the mental-health side effects of an unrequited love.

“I loved someone that was not available to be loved by me, and so that drove me crazy,” Brandy told The Post about the song, whose video, depicting the straitjacketed star in a padded room, ends with the words, “You are not alone!” in a PSA. “I wanted to use my music as a way to start more conversations about mental health and how that’s something that we all need to work on every day.”

Brandy Norwood has been working hard since she was a kid, making her self-titled debut — featuring hits such as “I Wanna Be Down” and “Baby” — when she was just 15. But now she’s making grown woman’s R&B on her new LP, “B7,” her seventh studio album — and her first since 2012.

“I’ve been through a lot in those eight years — a lot of heartbreak, a lot of pain, a lot of ups and downs with love, trauma, mental health,” said Brandy. “Everything you could think about, I went through.”

Having only dabbled in writing previously, Brandy co-wrote every song on “B7,” making the album — a more mature, moodier version of 2004’s “Afrodisiac” — her most personal work ever. She was inspired to “go there” by Grammy-winning songwriter LaShawn Daniels, one of her “B7” producers, who died last September.

“He encouraged me to write my own lyrics: ‘What story do you want to tell? What do you need to heal from?’ ” said Brandy. “From there, songs poured out of me.”

“B7” plays like confessional therapy on tunes such as “Bye Bipolar,” the closing track. “I have not been diagnosed as bipolar,” Brandy said, “but I’ve had moments where trauma has caused me to not be myself, and I felt at a point that I could’ve experienced moments of that.”

Brandy has nothing but empathy for Kanye West, who she collaborated with on 2004’s “Talk About Our Love,” as he struggles with bipolar disorder. “I think Kanye, he needs a lot of love and a lot of compassion from all of us,” she said. “I think it’s a very hard thing to walk in his shoes. We have no clue of what he really goes through every day of his life. I know we see what we see, but no one really knows what he’s going through and how deep it can be. And then his family and his children . . . We should all just lay off of him.”

Brandy has a very special collaborator on “B7”: Sy’rai, her 18-year-old daughter with her producer ex, Robert “Big Bert” Smith. “You know, ‘Baby Mama’ was about her, but then to do a song with her? That was always my dream,” she said of their mother-daughter duet on “High Heels.” “I just can’t wait to see how far she goes with [music]. I’m definitely overprotective, though. I don’t play that.”

Of course, when Brandy was Sy’rai’s age, she was starring as “Moesha” on TV. To her fans’ delight, the sitcom recently came to Netflix, and Brandy says it would be her “dream role” to play Moesha again in a series reboot.

Brandy would also like to see her 1997 TV movie “Cinderella” come to streaming — on Disney . She still misses her Fairy Godmother, Whitney Houston, eight years after her death. “I miss her every day. I’m not over it,” she said. “She was a wonderful light. No matter what she went through, you could always see the light. And I just pray that she’s resting well.”