“Mental health is not just an issue for the individual. It’s an issue of society, and how we live our lives.” Only in its first issue, we’re already finding that the new magazine Anxiety Empire offers a new perspective on our mental wellbeing. Each issue is intended to explore an aspect of our individual mental health as it is being shaped by a wider societal issue. This first focuses on how the world of media impacts us, including much-needed perspectives on how systemic racism within the media impacts the mental health of black men, the incursions of the internet on our mental wellness, and the strain on individuals working as social media moderators. Free (as founder Zoe Hough believes access to this information should be available to all), seek out the forthcoming second edition on education and its impact on our mental health. 

“It is said that 1 in 4 people will struggle with their mental health at some point during their lives. But this magazine is not just for the 1 in 4. It’s for all of us. We all have mental health. And we all have an impact on how society operates, and how it will change moving forwards. While this magazine doesn’t seek to provide easy answers, I do hope that among these pages you’ll find knowledge, inspiration, curiosity and connection.” – Zoe Hough

A magazine devoted to mental health that was shortlisted for MIND’s Media Award, Happiful brings together practical ideas to support ourselves and each other. So if you want to know more about the gut/brain axis, how therapeutic writing works, and how to find hygge in your home, Happiful has the features, interviews, and advice you need. An easy read and essential pick-me-up grounded in science — every issue is reviewed by an accredited counselor. Also a Podcast and An App. 

“We’re on a mission to create a healthier, happier, more sustainable society. Our aim is to provide informative, inspiring and topical stories about mental health and wellbeing. We want to break the stigma of mental health in our society, and to shine a light on the positivity and support that should be available for everyone, no matter their situation.”

Also into it’s last edition (someone tell us what’s happening to mental health-focused indie mags and which ones are still going that they’d recommend?), Doll Hospital Journal puts on the printed page essays, interviews, illustrations, photography, and more on the theme of mental health. Their mission is a laudable one: “With your help we want to persevere in our mission to stretch, question, re-tell and create our own narratives surrounding mental health/illness.”

And though their work for now is done, you can still support them by purchasing previous issues. All profits from these sales are now being donated to two organizations, INQUEST and Trans Survivors Switchboard.

Doll Hospital is a bi-annual art and literature print journal on mental health. It encourages work with an intersectional focus as the history of mental health is so closely tied to the history of race, class, gender identity, sexuality, colonialism, chronic illness, and disability.

— Doll Hospital

This independent magazine has just concluded its run—or maybe we’re hoping taking a break—after two years and four issues. Berkeley based Anxy, led by Indhira Rojas, has taken on mental health and reimagined how we talk, present and think about it—no mean feat given how complex that subject is. Somehow it pulls it off—doing away with stigma, and bringing in honest, raw, impactful narratives on what a range of personal lives look like. From their first issue Anger through to Workaholism, Boundaries, and most recently Masculinity, here is great design brought together with great voices.

“Nearly half of American adults develop a mental illness in their lifetime; depression affects 350 million people worldwide. Yet the struggle to be well is still a shameful secret so many of us lock away—despite the fact that it drives us.”

- Anxy Mag

With its distinct transatlantic feel and unafraid to go there approach, we fell hard for Sex Education (as did many a Netflix viewer). The lovable, until he’s not, Otis (Asa Butterfield) dispenses not yet won sex advice to fellow teens, mirroring his mum’s (Gillian Anderson as the alluring Dr. Jean Milburn) own sex therapy practice. Each episode takes on another case but talks about positions and partners reveal more about vulnerabilities than technique. Here the characters are striving to understand themselves, their bodies, each other, and their place within it all. That creator Laurie Nunn manages to interweave stories that touch on shame, depression, and anxiety with a lightness of touch and humor is a huge part of its magic (also the Forest of Dean settings and 80s vibe). 

“It's a fine balance, listening to people without inserting yourself into their reality.” — Dr. Jean Milburn

Though so far underrated, this comedy-drama series loosely based on poet Emily Dickinson’s life — it’s given a very contemporary millennial spin – lingers with us beyond the credits. For us, it’s how Emily (played by Hailee Steinfeld) follows her emotional, imaginary, romantic, and psychological life wherever it takes her (sometimes into death’s carriage, sometimes unable to leave her room, sometimes into conversations with the departed or the never there). Living in the world and living in her mind are often the same thing; her attempts to unravel the connections between the two, or to abandon an understanding of them entirely, what keeps us transfixed. Also we love how Emily’s sister Lavinia (Anna Baryshnikov) sinks into her eccentricities during the two seasons and finds them as her own ‘twisted, witchy, creative, horny’ truth. 

“Emily: Uh, I don’t know. Lost is how I feel now when I sit down to write. All I see is a blank piece of paper staring back at me.

Frederick Law Olmsted: Well, that doesn’t sound like being lost. That sounds like being all too aware of yourself and the noisy world around you. I’m talking about being so focused on something that you disappear into it. You lose track of time and space and people. It’s just you and your flow. Surely, you’ve experienced that.

Emily: I have, but I don’t anymore.

Frederick Law Olmsted: Then you need to get lost, totally lost.”

Through this seven-episode series, chess prodigy Beth Harmon goes from playing against the janitor she calls her first mentor in the basement of the orphanage where she is sent aged 9 to facing off against the world champion aged 22 in opulent Russian rooms. Along the way she competes against a series of male opponents within the realm of the game, and with herself in the moments she leaves the board. Netflix’s most-watched limited scripted series to date enticed us most for the battle Harmon forges against herself, as she navigates a legacy of genius and madness inherited from her mother with coping techniques that largely involve tranquilizers and alcohol and even the game of chess itself.  

“I feel safe in an entire world of just 64 squares.” – Beth Harmon

How to sum up this complex, addictive two-series story about an anti-heroine who says fucks a lot, and fucks a lot, and fucks it all up, and is fucking brilliant. Here is a voice that does not offer your standard feminist millenial narrative. Here is an actual real, fully fleshed out female character written by an actual funny, smart and disarming woman who gets to assert her own idiosyncratic, authentic and reassuringly contradictory perspective (unpack that if you will!). Here is a voice that just gets the humor of it all even if the pain and confusion inserts itself right next to it. Here is a woman that is sinking in her mistakes as she breezes through the abundance of what life should look like in your twenties living in London. We were mesmerized, as we know many others were. Also hot priest, just saying.

I have a horrible feeling I am a greedy, perverted, selfish, apathetic, cynical, depraved, morally bankrupt woman who can’t even call herself a feminist.

— Fleabag

During RJ Cutler’s two-hour documentary on the now just 19-year-old music phenomenon we were reminded again and again of how Billie Eilish is someone who is trying to manage her own mental health while allowing others into that space with her. There are layers here not just of the story of fame and fandom, music production and branding, but of what it means to be a teenager at this moment, and what it means for this teenager, in particular, to be in relationship with herself and the world. At one stage, Eilish’s mum Maggie Baird says: “It’s a really hard time for teenagers, I think. Kids are depressed. It’s a scary time”, connecting it back to the recession, politics, and climate change; and when asked why her music is so dark, Eilish replies: “Every single person is going through something good or bad, or horrible or amazing, you know? The least I can do is make art that I make because I have the same problems.” There’s suicidal ideation, self-harm, anxiety, and the tics from Tourette’s that Eilish experiences. There’s contending with a distant boyfriend and a breakup, exhaustion and miscommunication, injury and humiliation. And there’s so much hope and openness about the possibilities to sit within this narrative and to not just survive it but to make it the very material in which we live our lives.

“Why do we have to cope? Why can’t we just let it happen?

I feel the dark thing, I feel them very strongly. So, why would I not talk about them?” — Billie Eilish

It was A Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful that first brought participatory artist Candy Chang to our attention. Situated at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York over 2018, and realized in collaboration with James A. Reeves, for this installation visitors wrote on vellum cards an answer to the statement “I’m anxious because…” and added these to the wall of other responses. By the end of the project, 55,000 people had contributed their answers. This public call and response has echoes in Chang’s other works, the astonishing Before I diewhich started with the artist covering a house in New Orleans in chalk paint and stenciling the beginning of this sentence for passer-by to complete, and the current project across locations in LA, Light the Barricades, that creates interludes of self-reflection in amidst city lives of distraction. Seek her work out; these pieces come from a direct understanding of depression and anxiety but also shape it into collective ways, so that we might see in others ourselves, or if not that then maybe an empathy for difference and our individual humanity.

“I’m anxious because… I feel so much responsibility in my own potential, our nation is more socially fragmented than before, I’m afraid of being yelled at online, my dad died and I’m afraid I’ll be sad forever. I’m hopeful because… I’m ready to fall in love again, he seems committed about his recovery, my mother is becoming more accepting of others, music saves my life a little every day.”

— From 'A Monument for the Anxious and Hopeful'