How substance abuse, trauma, dissociation, and other factors affect actors
The image of the “tortured artist” is a well-established trope that is thought to have been coined by the philosopher Plato, who stated that “madness is a gift from the gods.” And examples of such artists have been showcased throughout history; such as Van Gogh, who cut off his ear in a manic state; and Beethoven, who felt the need to douse himself in cold water before beginning to compose his pieces. Though many of these cases are well-known, there is a group of artists whose struggles have gone unnoticed, or, if noticed, romanticized in a way. Performing artists, especially actors, have been known to have an abnormally high rate of substance abuse and health risk factors. Dr. Cheryl McFarren, in her doctoral thesis, stated that actors had a high risk of “sleep deprivation; poor dietary habits; excesses of caffeine, tobacco, and alcohol; and… use of street drugs.” In fact, McFarren stated that actors’ usage of drugs was much higher than she had encountered in both musicians and in dancers. Furthermore, according to a study done in 2015, nearly 40% of actors reported some difficulty in shaking off the emotional effect from intense roles (Robb, “Exploring Psychological Wellbeing”). As these statistics indicate, actors face a higher risk of negative psychological impacts due to external factors, such as environmental pressure and the methodology of acting, and internal factors, such as various mental health disorders and unresolved traumas.
The case of Heath Ledger and The Joker
Heath Ledger’s death is one well-known case of a prominent actor whose death was attributed to his work for a long time. Back in January of 2008, actor and music video director Heath Ledger was found dead, at the young age of 28, on the floor of his rented apartment in Soho, New York. An autopsy revealed that he had died accidentally due to “the abuse of prescription medications” (O’Neill, Looper). Ledger, who was renowned for his roles in films such as A Knight’s Tale and 10 Things I Hate About You, was mourned by fans all over the world. However, as he had recently finished filming for The Dark Knight as the Joker, the circumstances surrounding his death led to many rumors and speculation, with some people saying that his role as the Joker affected his mental state to the point where he took his own life. The fact that he was reportedly struggling with insomnia and anxiety which led him to take the pills that he accidentally overdosed on certainly seemed to back up the rumors as well.
However, a documentary released in 2017 titled I am Heath Ledger, revealed that there were seemingly no such negative impacts from his role as the Joker, according to interviews done with his friends and family members. “[Heath] had an amazing sense of humor and certainly playing the Joker, for him it was one big gag. He had so much fun doing that. It was actually the exact opposite. There was no doom and gloom,” said Kate Ledger, Heath Ledger’s sister, in a phone call with the directors of the documentary. He was also said to have finished filming The Dark Knight and was already in the middle of filming another movie, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus when he passed away. Taking this into consideration, it is inconclusive to say that stepping into the shoes of a deranged character alone is enough to drive an actor off the deep end, so to speak.
External Factors
Actors and Work-related Stress
It has been found that actors experience high rates of work-related stress, which was also linked to their psychological well-being. A group of researchers at the School of Psychology in the University of Adelaide conducted a study on the psychological well-being of a group of Australian actors, in which they recruited twenty Australian actors, with ages ranging from 22 to 66 years old and professional acting experiences ranging from 1 to 50 years. The participants were interviewed individually, and asked questions related to their psychological well-being, such as “what are the best things about the acting industry?” or “do you think there are unique psychological difficulties actors face?”(5) The results of the interviews showed that most of the actors felt a sense of powerlessness in their careers, emphasizing that “factors other than work ethic or talent determined career success” (6). The actors also reported financial instability and feeling a sense of isolation from the rest of mainstream society. Also, when the actors were asked about their work environment, they reported that although they received peer support and experienced low stigmatization of mental health issues, they also felt pressured by the professional work environment to keep their problems to themselves.
Taking all of these factors into account, it is not hard to see that actors would be vulnerable to negative psychological influences, as well as experiencing the need to abuse substances as an escape from the pressures of their jobs. “There tends to be an attitude of ‘live and let live’ unless the situation approaches an emergency level… many of these individuals fail to seek help when treatment might be appropriate and efficacious,” stated Dr. Alice Brandfonbrener, the founder of the Performing Arts Medicine Association, when talking about the social environment surrounding actors (Seton, “Post-Dramatic Stress”). This attitude of “live and let live” could also contribute to the high amount of substance abuse among actors.
Substance Abuse and Trauma
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, substance use itself falls under the category of a mental disorder, but people suffering from substance use disorders can also experience co-occurring mental disorders and vice versa. Statistics from the Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality also showed that there was a high rate of comorbidity between substance use and anxiety disorders, including PTSD. This is further evidence that actors face a higher risk of experiencing negative mental health effects due to unhealthy habits.
Furthermore, actors are also said to experience more trauma than usual when compared to others in performing fields, which was proven by a study done by Paula Thomson and Jaque S. Victoria of California State University. The experiment was done on a sample of 21 male and 20 female actors, as well as a control group of people from non-acting fields, athletes, and other individuals who expressed interest in arts and sports without participating in them. The study was done by interviewing the participants and probing past and present experiences about attachment, loss, and trauma. The interviews were measured using coherence, organization, and content of the participants’ responses in order to score them on a scale of how much self-perceived trauma and dissociative experiences each participant experienced. The results showed that the sample of actors expressed feeling more trauma as opposed to the control group, with a large proportion of the actor group tending to have lapses of “monitoring of reason and discourse” which included psychological disorientation of space and time (364). The reason that this is concerning is the fact that some actors have been found to be more prone to “blurring lines” between reality and their characters, and the unresolved trauma in their lives has the potential to cause bigger negative effects on their mental health. The high rates of substance abuse among actors coupled with the fact that actors experience high rates of trauma could not only affect the actors themselves, but also those around them and their loved ones in their lives outside of acting.
Method Acting
There may also be an issue with a certain technique that actors use to get into character. Method acting is a technique that encourages actors to fully immerse themselves in their roles and to connect to the characters by drawing on experiences that evoke emotional reactions. It emerged in the 20th century and was further developed by Lee Strasberg, who was a student of acting at the time.
It seems quite telling that two of his fellow actors, who had previously worked with him on the development of the technique, went on to disparage method acting. They claimed that it was “misusing and overemphasizing” the technique of recalling experiences (Panero, 430). In the current day, there are still practitioners of method acting, but it is becoming apparent that method acting may be dangerous for the actors’ mental states and physical well-being. Most notable examples of extreme method acting include Daniel Day-Lewis, who spent six months living in the wilderness in preparation for his role in Last of the Mohicans, and Heath Ledger, who stated in an interview that he locked himself up in a hotel room for a month in order to put himself in the same manic state of his character (Ledger, Empire). Maria Eugenia Panero, a researcher at Yale University who specializes in the psychology of acting, stated that “directors are not prepared to recognize changes in actors’ mental health and so often ignore the possible psychological repercussions of acting on the actors.” The fact that actors experience high rates of dissociation also suggests that method acting is not a healthy practice for people in the industry.
Internal Factors
Blurred Lines
Some actors also reported that they experienced a blurring of lines between their real personalities and those of their characters. Gregory Hyppolite Brown, a Doctor of Clinical Psychology and an international film director, conducted a study on how actors’ time on movie sets could affect their lives inside and outside of the sets. For the study, he interviewed six actors with varying levels of success in movie and television roles. One of these actors, when discussing his mental state when stepping into a role, claimed that he “let go” of himself, and another actor reported that he was able to better connect with his character’s emotions by triggering memories related to sadness and anger (45). Furthermore, the actors also reported they experienced lapses in character, or “character autonomy.” Brown describes this phenomenon as a state where “a character eclipses an actor’s pre-performance identity” (64). Benedict Cumberbatch, an actor renowned for his roles in The Imitation Game and BBC’s Sherlock, was said to have experienced this effect.
In an interview, he said: “I do get affected by [acting]. There’s a sense of being impatient. My mum says I’m much curter with her when I’m filming Sherlock” (Jarrett, Aeon).
However, according to Samuel Kampa, a PhD candidate and dissertation fellow of Fordham University, actors are not likely to lose control of their autonomy. To prove his position, Kampa used an example of a theoretical model made by the cognitive scientists Shaun Nicols and Stephen Stich. The model in question viewed peoples’ minds as collections of boxes, made up of beliefs, desires, and a “possible world box,” which contains thoughts that a person does not believe or desire, but think of regardless. By applying this model to situations where actors immersed themselves in their characters, he found that people only paid attention to the “Possible World Box,” which did not influence their true beliefs and desires. Kampa also gave the example of Heath Ledger, and stated:
If and when Ledger was fully immersed in the character of the Joker, he consciously thought things such as ‘Chaos is beautiful’ or ‘Chance alone is fair,’ and he did not consciously think ‘I am Heath Ledger’ or ‘I am acting on a soundstage.’ In other words, Ledger attended only to his Possible World Box, paying no attention to his Belief and Desire boxes. (Kampa, Aeon)
According to this theoretical model, actors’ “actual beliefs and desires remain the same,” so actors are not likely to really forget who they are. Kampa states that the actors only “’forget themselves’ in the sense that they actively ignore facts about who they are, temporarily subordinating their own thoughts and feelings to those of their character” (Kampa, Aeon).
Though Kampa’s argument carries some validity, it still seems a bit abstract and inconclusive. Furthermore, Brown provides more evidence that actors do, in fact, tend to lose themselves in their roles, to the extent that it affected their personal relationships and life outside of acting. The actors that Brown interviewed voiced concerns about changes that they had felt after performing as a character. One of the actors even stated that he had begun to act more like his character outside of acting, and that he’d have to put in a conscious effort to stop himself from doing so. Finally, another actor stated that he would wonder when he was in character and when he was not, and noted that “leaving the character behind… had to be helped along with alcohol and drugs” (55).
Dissociation
Other psychological influences and factors affecting actors were further examined by Maria Eugenia Panero. Panero stated that there were several psychological effects that actors largely experienced, which included boundary blurring and dissociation. Panero found that acting had been historically linked to dissociation, which is described in the DSM-5 as “an interruption or break in the typical integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, perception, body representation, motor control, or behavior” (Loewenstein, “Dissociation Debates”). Panero noted that in ancient Syrian and Greek mythology, creativity was said to have been given to humans by external beings such as genies or muses, who were then possessed by these beings and were compelled to produce works of art (433).
This seems to have carried on to the modern day, as many actors are also said to have experienced some form of dissociation. Dissociation mainly stems from three factors: trauma, which is the most common factor in dissociation and manifests in forms such as PTSD; pathological absorption, which is the “disposition for having episodes of complete focus” (434); and fantasy proneness, which is commonly attributed to spending a lot of time daydreaming.
In conclusion, the fact that actors are affected by their jobs is reinforced by many different scholars and even by some actors as well. The impact caused by acting could be split into two general groups: An external, social aspect; and an internal, psychological aspect. The external factors included pressure from the work environment that actors are put in and high rates of substance abuse. On the other hand, the psychological factors included high rates of self-perceived and unresolved traumas, as well as high rates of dissociation among actors. Another problem seemed to be the method acting technique, which seems to put actors at risk of weakening their self-autonomy. In order to promote better mental health among actors, acting schools should consider alternative acting methods, directors should better recognize changes in actors’ mental health, and more awareness should be raised about the issue of mental health among actors.
Works Cited
Brown, Gregory Hyppolite. “Blurred Lines between Role and Reality: A Phenomenological Study.” AURA: Open Access to Scholarly Research, Antioch University, Aug. 2019, aura.antioch.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1560&context=etds.
Jarrett, Christian. “Acting Changes the Brain: It’s How Actors Get Lost in a Role.” Aeon, aeon.co/ideas/acting-changes-the-brain-its-how-actors-get-lost-in-a-role.
John Mathews, LCSW. “The Tortured Artist: A Creativity Myth or Reality?” Virginia Counseling — Midlothian VA and Online, 9 Apr. 2022, www.vacounseling.com/tortured-artist/.
Kampa, Samuel. “Is Acting Hazardous? on the Risks of Immersing Oneself in a Role: Aeon Ideas.” Aeon, 18 Nov. 2022, https://aeon.co/ideas/is-acting-hazardous-on-the-risks-of-immersing-oneself-in-a-role.
Loewenstein, Richard J. “Dissociation Debates: Everything You Know Is Wrong.” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Sept. 2018, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6296396/#:~:text=The%20Diagnostic%20and%20Statistical%20Manual,body%20representation%2C%20and%20motor%20control.
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Panero, Maria Eugenia. “A Psychological Exploration of the Experience of Acting.” Creativity Research Journal, vol. 31, no. 4, 2019, pp. 428–442., https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2019.1667944.
Richards, Olly. “World Exclusive: The Joker Speaks.” Empire, 28 Nov. 2007, https://www.empireonline.com/movies/news/world-exclusive-joker-speaks/.
Robb, Alison E, et al. “Exploring Psychological Wellbeing in a Sample of Australian Actors.” Australian Psychologist, vol. 53, no. 1, 2018, pp. 77–86., https://doi.org/10.1111/ap.12221.
Seton, Mark. “‘Post-Dramatic’ Stress: Negotiating Vulnerability for Performance.” University of Sydney EScholarship Repository, 2006 ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/2518/ADSA2006_Seton.pdf?sequence=1.
Thomson, Paula, and S. Victoria Jaque. “Holding a Mirror up to Nature: Psychological Vulnerability in Actors.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, vol. 6, no. 4, 2012, pp. 361–369., https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028911.
“I Am Heath Ledger”, Directed by Butenhuis, Adrian and Derik Murray. Network Entertainment, 2017, www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.64adf5cf-89fc-ba95-bd12-7d6f88c092b2?ref_=imdbref_tt_wbr_pvt_aiv&tag=imdbtag_tt_wbr_pvt_aiv-20. Accessed 24 Oct. 2022.
“Substance Use and Co-Occurring Mental Disorders.” National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/substance-use-and-mental-health.
