Across television, film and music industries, people are struggling with heightened stress, anxiety and depression, reports THR in its latest cover story.
Look online or around you even, there are people who are struggling with mental health issues. We know the numbers have been rising and it is an epidemic.
We remember Deepika Padukone as one of the leading figures from modern Bollywood to speak about her struggle with depression. Karan Johar has spoken about his battle with clinical depression. Ileana D’Cruz has also spoken about her struggle with depression and body dysmorphic disorder.
In Pakistan, artists such as Momina Mustehsan, Saheefa Jabbar Khattak and Nouman Javaid have spoken about their struggles while, Mahira Khan and Meesha Shafi, in the aftermath of the suicide of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain earlier this year, have spoken up about the need for awareness and outreach to better understand these issues.
Hollywood, it seems, is looking at the same issues. Noted The Hollywood Reporter (THR) in a cover story after speaking to members of film, television and music industries, “Speak to writers, producers, actors and executives — speak, in fact, to the whole chain of employees toiling across the film, television and music industries, as THR did — and you’ll have trouble finding people who won’t admit to heightened feelings of stress, anxiety and depression, three interlinked mental-health issues that have escalated over the past decade in the entertainment sector. ‘I’m always having anxiety,’ says Oscar-winning producer Cathy Schulman (Crash), echoing dozens of others interviewed. ‘Stress seems to happen every day in Hollywood. There’s anxiety all around’.”
Part of it has to do with changing times, the arrival of deep-pocketed streaming platforms that have not only changed how things are presented but also how viewers consume content, leading to uncertainty in studios and networks across the board, adding to further stress, anxiety and in many cases, depression.
“There’s unpredictability in their position, and unpredictability is a fundamental building block of anxiety,” Michelle Craske, director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at UCLA, a port of call for many industry members dealing with mental-health issues, told THR. “That lack of control is paramount in entertainment.”
In the cover story, THR further notes: “Executives can be promoted or fired at will; actors might land a lead role or never work again. ‘I realize that I’m incredibly anxious 24/7 and I never realized that,’ actress Rosanna Arquette said. ‘I take on a lot of people’s energy, and I soak it up. It’s exhausting and affects everything’.”
“Anxiety is extraordinarily high because different things are valued than [were] valued before,” Tom Pollock, a former chairman of Universal Pictures and now an independent producer, told The Hollywood Reporter.
As for the answers to these interlinked mental issues that have emerged in Hollywood, therapy, meditation and medication are all options tried by some. But whether the larger issues that elevate these problems will be fixed, one can never be sure of what’s to come.
– With information from The Hollywood Reporter
