Kristen Bell teams up with Dr. Stacey L. Smith, founder of the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, to advance authentic mental health storytelling.
Bell and Smith are launching an initiative called the Mental Health Accelerator to support emerging filmmakers and fund short films that focus on mental health stories. The program comes on the heels of a new report by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which found that just 1.7% (77 people) of the 4,425 actors in the top 100 grossing films of 2024 had a mental health condition. This number is significantly lower than the 23.4% of U.S. adults who fall into that category.
The study also showed that more than half (54) of the top 100 films did not feature a character with a mental health condition. In those cases, those characters were identified as male, slightly more likely to be white, and less likely to be elderly, children, or teenagers. Four characters with mental health issues identify as LGBTQ+. None of the characters were transgender or non-binary.
“We all experience mental health, both good and bad,” Bell said in a statement. “The Mental Health Accelerator is designed to fund filmmakers who want to tell stories that are relevant to expanding resilience and building capacity. The stories they bring to screen will offer audiences new perspectives on mental health, expand our vocabulary and expand our ability to support each other and ourselves when we need it most.”
Three filmmakers will be selected and each will receive $20,000 in funding for a short fictional project centered around mental health topics with an emphasis on resilience and development. Applications will open in November and will be reviewed by a team including Bell, Dr. Smith and Dirty Films producer Coco Francini. Winners will be announced early next year. For more information about the program, including complete eligibility requirements, please visit the organization’s website.
“Audiences are looking for authentic and meaningful stories about mental health, but our research shows that such depictions are rare,” Dr. Smith said. “The Mental Health Accelerator brings an original focus to mental health, giving emerging storytellers the opportunity to fill a huge gap in entertainment. Our goal is that with this accelerator, we will create more content that meets audience demand and showcases mental health with compassion and hope.”
Professor Smith also reflected on a study co-authored by Dr Katherine Pieper, Amy Christopher and W. Michael Sayers that looked at the prevalence and prevalence of mental health conditions in 400 popular films released in 2016, 2019, 2022 and 2024. One key finding was that there was no change over time in terms of the prevalence of characters suffering from mental health conditions, which was 1.7% of all speaking characters in movies. The top 100 movies of 2016 fell into this category.
“Hollywood continues to portray mental health in movies in a distorted way,” Smith said of the study. “Not only is it largely underrepresented relative to demographic indicators, but characters with mental health conditions underrepresent women, children, older teens, and underrepresented populations living with real mental health challenges. Films’ silence about these themes does little to encourage acceptance, help-seeking, and compassion in audiences.”
The study, which can be read in full here, looked at seven types of mental health conditions: addiction (17), mood disorders (18), anxiety/PTSD (19), suicide (16), cognitive impairment (21), major thought disorders (6), spectrum disorders (1), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (2).
However, characters with mental health conditions were primarily represented in negative contexts, and were often stigmatized and belittled. Furthermore, mental health was also associated with violence, with 52.7% of characters being perpetrators of violence and 61.3% being targets of violence. Roughly a quarter of these characters died during the film’s investigation.
Additionally, less than one-third of characters with mental health issues receive treatment, and less than 15 percent of characters use any type of medication to treat their mental health issues. “In other words, movies make mental health conditions appear as if they are untreatable,” the study said. “By not depicting these treatments, films can promote an outdated view of mental health and reinstitute stigma and stigma against people living with and successfully managing mental health conditions.”
Dr. Smith said the Mental Health Accelerator “focuses on the very inaccuracies identified in this study. Giving emerging creators the ability to tell new stories that counter unrealistic portrayals of people with mental health conditions is a means to change perceptions and attitudes about mental health off-screen.”
