Former Studio Exec Speaks Out: I Took a Mental Health Break and It Saved My Life (Guest Blog)

Last week, I went to Malibu to watch friends of mine surf. As we arrived we noticed Jonah Hill getting his board out of the car. I had an impulse to say, “Hi Jonah, remember me, I did the marketing on ‘Superbad,’” but I stopped myself.

The other beachgoers made a different choice. As he walked across the sand, a chorus of “Jonahs” followed him, and as he got ready to surf I saw everyone capture the moment to share with their friends on social media. I sat in my chair and watched him out in the distance, catching wave after wave and thought about how nice it must feel out there, away from everyone’s prying eyes.

Two days later, he released a statement that he would not be promoting his upcoming films in order to preserve his mental health. He also announced that he had made a documentary called “Stutz” that would be debuting at film festivals this fall. Hill describes the film as a “journey of self discovery,” and revealed that “I have come to the understanding that I have spent nearly 20 years experiencing anxiety attacks, which are exacerbated by media appearances and public facing events.”

He follows in the recent footsteps of a large number of public figures, both in entertainment and sports, who have become open about their mental health struggles, and in many cases, about the toll the glare of the media spotlight takes on their self esteem and pleasure in pursuing their chosen careers.

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I have followed all of these stories with keen interest for a very personal reason. Having suffered undiagnosed ADHD, anxiety and depression since I was a child, I chose to leave my career at the height of my success in order to care for my mental health. No one believed I had quit and had not been fired — including the Los Angeles Times — but I had finally snapped.

My already tender brain was in overload after a year of caring for my father, who had suffered a psychotic break not long after my mother’s death from cancer. I could no longer handle being on the receiving end of insulting emails from a certain volatile producer about a movie I loved and was doing my best to market, or anguished phone calls from executives about bad tracking. One day in August, I screamed that and more at my bosses at the studio, Amy Pascal and Jeff Blake, through a veil of tears.

Up until that moment, I was a classic overachiever, the first-born of a middle class family who got herself an internship at Rogers & Cowan and worked her way up to president of marketing at Sony Pictures. Unbeknownst to all, our family was hiding a secret. Our Harvard-educated, gregarious, philanthropic and successful father of three had severe depression that would occasionally develop into full-blown psychosis.

I never told my colleagues about the two years he had spent in and out of psychiatric hospital when I was 30, or that on the December day I attended the Hollywood Reporter Women in Power breakfast where I was an honoree, my next stop was to UCLA’s Neuropsych ward, where I would collect my dad, who had been an inpatient since early November having thrice weekly electroconvulsive therapy treatments.

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For the uninitiated, when the doctor recommended “shock therapy,” something I only knew from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” I was stunned. I was even more stunned when my father shouted he had already had a similar treatment when I was 4 years old and that he would get a court order if I signed the release forms.

I remember sitting next to Amy Pascal at that breakfast and making silly jokes with her, both of us giggling inappropriately at such an august gathering. It was the only way I knew to manage the anxiety that was coursing through my body as I contemplated taking my father and the live-in caregiver he was adamantly opposed to down to Newport Beach that afternoon to begin our new reality.

This was all a very long time ago, but the memories are as vivid as if it happened yesterday, which brings us to the reason I am sitting here typing. On Monday, I woke up and opened an email from TheWrap, with a headline that said “Hollywood Takes a Mental Health Break.” Having been a mental health advocate and the CEO of a 501c3 dedicated to mental health since the day I drove my dad home from the hospital, I clicked the link thinking it would be a version of the same article I have been reading for the last few months.

I was surprised to see that the author had taken a different approach, and I read the piece three times to make sure I was not misunderstanding the tone. Benjamin Svetkey seemed to posit that these stars and athletes are to be mocked, and that they did not get the memo that “the show must go on.” He name-checked people like Lady Gaga and Daniel Craig admiringly for performing after vomiting and for continuing to work on a James Bond film with a broken leg.

I was perplexed that he did not consider the fact that Lady Gaga has spoken openly about her own mental health struggles and has an incredible nonprofit, the BTW Foundation, run by her mother, that works tirelessly to promote mental health. I was also curious whether he had done any research into Jonah Hill’s family. If he had he might have read read about Your Mom Cares, an organization co-founded by his mother, working in a similar space.

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But, the part that made my jaw drop was when he lumped Marlon Brando, Heath Ledger, Robert De Niro and Daniel Day-Lewis into the same thought, that it is more important to make a movie than consider the physical or psychological toll it might be taking on the performer.

I worked at Sony when Heath Ledger started in “A Knight’s Tale” and I also did the marketing on “Lords of Dogtown.” I remember how dismayed Heath was when he saw his face plastered on billboards all over town, and I also remember begging him to participate in the junket for “Dogtown” only to cover my face in shame in the green room as the journalists asked him intrusive and personal questions that had nothing to do with promoting the film. He was sweet and gentle and had arrived on time and ready to work, and I could tell the day had turned out exactly as he had feared.

In my over 30 years promoting films, I learned that some actors just really wanted to act, and I found myself repeatedly doing things like begging a 17-year-old actress to pose in a bikini on the cover of a national magazine. When she and her mother both cried and begged me not to make her do it, I felt so guilty. I called my boss and told him the same and he said, “This is not your fault. It is the price of fame.”

Is it really? Young and talented people come to Hollywood and we eat them alive. And, now with social media, they have the added pressure of people saying horrible things about them in real time on platforms where they are told they must expose themselves daily to sell movie tickets.

I firmly believe that publicity is part of the job of selling a film. I would be a hypocrite if I denied that, having made my living in film publicity and marketing. However, I also believe that actors, musicians and athletes are people first, and if they have the courage to stand up and expose their vulnerabilities to the world we should honor them, and thank them for lending their celebrity to a cause that until very recently has been hidden in the shadows.

Imagine if fans of Jonah Hill read his statement and feel emboldened to take a look at their own mental health. Wouldn’t we as an industry love to add that to our collective resumes, rather than more stories of young actors gone before their time because the pressures we place on them to drive them to drugs, and even more tragically, to suicide?

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 1-800-273-TALK (8255) is a free, 24/7 confidential service that can provide people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress, or those around them, with support, information and local resources.

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