Hollywood’s Mental Health Crisis: Calm, HeadSpace, Thrive & More Take The Stage As Big Media Combats Workplace Stress

deadline.com:

Editor’s note: This is the latest in a series of Deadline reports looking at how current upheaval in the media & entertainment industry is impacting mental health.

Today: Big media companies and resources they offer their employees in a fraught time. “There’s more focus on mental health in the workplace than ever before,” says Jason Richmond, VP Sales Solutions at HeadSpace, a popular mindfulness and meditation app that offers corporate clients mental health coaching, therapy and psychiatry. “We were all dealing with a pandemic, then dealing with the aftermath.” “Companies are taking care of employee mental health and putting it on the same footing as physical health,” agrees Danny Shea, chief brand officer of Thrive, a platform that encourages employees to take micro steps like breathing, stretching or brief rests on the job to help reduce anxiety.

HeadSpace and Thrive are joined by a growing group of businesses and nonprofits, from the Calm app to online therapy provider TalkSpace to corporate well-being platform Grokker and organizations like NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, that offers metal health resources to companies to expand the breadth of resources offered to staff as mental health services exploded across industries during Covid.

Entertainment was hit hard again, and again. A big side effect of Hollywood strikes was a roller coaster of unemployment: Waves of company layoffs keep coming in downsizing and mergers amid a messy, ongoing streaming revolution.