“This industry has more than 100,000 artists and another 150,000 crew, many of whom struggle with mental health issues” The Newportfolkfest: Making mental health a priority
, a new three-digit helpline, ‘988’, began a service for Americans to call if they were experiencing a mental health emergency. Those three numbers may prove to be the first small step for recovering a healthy mind during a period marked by back-to-back catastrophic traumas. While the pandemic caused layoffs, or gave employees the choice to work from home, it also brought with it a drastic, and barely reported, existential halt to the lives of performing artists.
In a white paper written in 2021, Zach Borer and Chayim Newman, two music executives with clinical mental health backgrounds, noted, “by early 2020, the music industry as we knew it was dead.” Borer and Newman were so alarmed by the effect the dismantling of an industry was having on the mental health of the industry as a whole, that they left their careers to open their own practice, Borer Newman, to provide services that address the mental well-being of music industry professionals.
This year at the Newport Folk Festival, Newman was back, and he decided to do something a bit different, which was to specifically target the alcohol and drug abuse aspect of mental health. “This industry has more than 100,000 artists and another 150,000 crew, many of whom struggle with mental health issues, struggle with sobriety and substance use issues,” Newman told me during our interview.
Because we are living in a period some call “post” COVID-19, musicians are now able to get on the road again. And getting on the road again brings along with it new challenges around staying sober, which can be different than they were at the height of the pandemic. As one musician told Newman, “I’m still getting used to being on the road and my anxiety level.” And from another concerned band member, “I’ve been trying to be sober while I’m working during the pandemic.
As it happens, I’ve been sober for 35 years—I think. That unsureness coming from how each year of sobriety is considered a “birthday” and like the later birthdays, one forgets how old one really is. What I do know is that my life as a sober person has been a lot longer than the life I spent in bars, or asleep in doorways, or waking up somewhere in another state with a stranger I barely recognized. I remember reading something in the A.A.
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