Kristen Bell is teaming up with Dr. Stacy L. Smith, founder of USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, to champion authentic mental health storytelling.
Bell and Smith are launching an initiative, dubbed the Mental Health Accelerator, to support emerging filmmakers and fund their short films focused on a mental health story. The program comes on the heels of a new report by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which discovered only 1.7% (77) of the 4,425 speaking characters across the 100 top-grossing movies of 2024 had a mental health condition; this figure is significantly below the 23.4% of U.S. adults who fall into that category.
The study also shows that more than half (54) of the top 100 films didn’t include any characters with a mental health condition; when they did, those characters were slightly more likely to be male-identified and white, and less likely to be elderly, children, or teens. Four characters with a mental health condition were identified as LGBTQ+. None of the characters were transgender or non-binary.
“We all experience mental health — both when we feel good and when we struggle,” said Bell in a statement. “The Mental Health Accelerator is designed to fund filmmakers who want to tell stories related to expanding resilience and building capacity. The stories they bring to the screen will offer audiences a new lens on mental health to expand our vocabulary and our ability to support each other – and ourselves – when we need it most.”
Three filmmakers will be selected to each receive $20,000 in funding for a short, fictional project centered on a mental health topic, with an emphasis on resilience and capacity building. Applications will open in November and will be reviewed by a team that includes Bell, Dr. Smith and producer Coco Francini of Dirty Films; winners will be announced early next year. More about the program, including full eligibility requirements, can be found on the organization’s website.
“Audiences want authentic and meaningful stories about mental health, but our research shows that these portrayals are rare,” said Dr. Smith. “The Mental Health Accelerator offers a seminal focus on mental health and gives emerging storytellers a chance to fill a significant gap in entertainment. Our goal is that this accelerator will result in more content that answers audience demand and showcases mental health with compassion and hope.”
Smith also reflected on the research study, co-authored by Dr. Katherine Pieper, Aimee Christopher & W. Michael Sayers, which examined the prevalence and context of mental health conditions in 400 popular movies released in 2016, 2019, 2022 and 2024. One key finding was that there has been no change over time in terms of the prevalence of characters with a mental health condition, as 1.7% of all speaking characters in the top 100 films of 2016 fell into that category.
“Hollywood continues to present a skewed picture of mental health in film,” Smith said about the research. “Not only is it rarely shown compared to population metrics, the characters with mental health conditions underestimate the women, children and teens, aging and underrepresented populations living with real mental health challenges. Film’s silence on these topics does little to encourage acceptance, help-seeking, and compassion from audiences.”
The study, which can be read in full here, observed 7 types of mental health conditions: addiction (17), mood disorders (18), anxiety/PTSD (19), suicide (16), cognitive impairment (21), significant disturbance in thinking (6), spectrum disorders (1), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (2).
However, characters with mental health conditions were primarily presented in a negative context and often stigmatized or disparaged. Additionally, mental health was also linked to violence, with 52.7% of characters as perpetrators of violence and 61.3% as targets. Roughly a quarter of these characters died during the movies examined.
Moreover, fewer than one-third of characters with mental health conditions were in therapy, and less than 15% used any form of medication to treat mental health issues. “In other words, films present mental health conditions in such a way that they seem untreatable,” the study reads. “By not depicting these remedies, films advance a view of mental health that is outdated and once again may create stigma and bias about people who live with and successfully manage mental health conditions.”
The Mental Health Accelerator, Dr. Smith noted, “takes aim at the very inaccuracies identified in this research. Giving emerging creators the ability to tell new stories that counter the unrealistic portrayal of people with mental health conditions is an avenue to changing perceptions and attitudes about mental health off-screen.”
