From Sushant Singh Rajput to Babil Khan: The Unspoken Mental Health Crisis in The Film Industry

Even if someone does not have a mental health condition, they are most likely to develop one once they get into the film industry,” producer Smriti Kiran tells The Hollywood Reporter India.

In the aftermath of actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide in 2020, Kiran, who was then the artistic director of the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, wondered how one could intervene at a moment when “the discourse was hijacked”. The hope was to work with the Producers Guild of India to “ease the daily life of working professionals in the industry”. The solutions her project was looking for were systemic. “Just giving a person a therapist is like giving a person with a bad lifestyle a gym trainer. It will be helpful, but you need to restructure the environment you are in.” She was thinking about how to make casting directors respond in a timely manner, how to make sure credit is not pulled away, that pathways exist if a manager is bullying an artiste and so on. Eventually, the pressures of putting up a film festival — which was eventually cancelled — meant this particular project had to be shelved, but the questions it raised have not faded in intensity.

With actor Babil Khan’s emotional outburst against “fake” Bollywood on Instagram in early May — which he deleted, but not before it became national news — the question of how being centre stage wrings actors into pale shadows of themselves was brought up. Given the media frenzy, Babil decided to “[take] some time off”, stepping away from signed projects.

This would not be the first time, and is unfortunately not likely to be the last, that the mental health of an actor burnt in the spotlight. In 1984, Parveen Babi penned her thoughts on her mental illness in The Illustrated Weekly of India — the irrationality of it, but also its triggers. She spoke of vaginal cream, virginal brides and smoking without shame, puffing through Dunhills, unbothered about what this meant for her reputation; “Have you ever wondered what it is like to function in life, distrusting everything and everybody?” Babi’s illness was sensationalised, read through the gossip vines of things she said and did.

Decades later, when actress Deepika Padukone gave an interview speaking about her spells of depression, the conversation felt like it was entering the mainstream, not through the backdoors of gossip, but as a respectable entry into a complicated issue. With Rajput’s death, the suspicions and accusations being flung, the discourse had been pushed back 10 steps.

“Today, young actors are going through the most difficult period of social pressure to look, behave and dress a certain way,” Sutapa Sikdar, film writer, Babil Khan’s mother, and the late Irrfan Khan’s wife, tells THR India. “They can’t be themselves publicly, which I didn’t see in Irrfan’s time. He dressed the way he did, spoke about society and politics frankly. Today if he was here, I don’t know what the repercussions would be. I find it shocking and difficult to exist in a society that says Babil is laughing too much or he is behaving [in a certain way], because individuality is the core of creativity.”

Additionally, Sikdar points out the lopsided nature of the discourse, “Nobody dares to recognise and speak about the problem until they have suffered and come out of it. But while they are going through it, everyone wants to hide it. Nobody admits anything because everything is based on perception, and then they will be bracketed.”

Ira Khan — actor Aamir Khan’s daughter and founder and CEO of Agatsu Foundation, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to mental health, and someone who has been vocal about her mental health journey — sees the issue from two perspectives. As an assistant director on set, she says she had experienced the “long and erratic work hours with night shoots that make it difficult to maintain a schedule. You are not eating healthy or sleeping well. These things affect your ability to deal with stress.”

Then, there are the actors, figures galvanised by the public flash, whose every inch is stitched to cater to a broader hunger for beauty. As Shaheen Bhatt — Alia Bhatt’s sister and author of I’ve Never Been (Un) Happier, a memoir of her mental health — notes, actors face a challenge unique to their profession. “You are dealing with a profession where the person is the product. So, when rejection comes, it feels a lot more personal. You feel like you are being rejected. ‘Is it the way I look? The way I am? The way I speak?’”

When actors have given away a part of themselves for public consumption — even if the perks include more money, more visibility, a greater capacity to command a room — do they also renounce their right to a healthy mental state?

“If an IT guy is running out of work, nobody knows. But when an actor is out of work, everybody knows it. Anybody has the right to ask an actor, ‘What are you doing now?’ And you can’t bluff,” Tamil actress Devadarshni Chetan tells THR India.

As a certified therapist currently training in body psychotherapy, Chetan notes a further wrinkle, “Actors invest our own emotions while acting. When we use our memories and feelings to act, we actually start feeling sad, as though the body is re-experiencing a particular memory of sadness. The actor may not realise this, but when you bring your body language and breathing into a particular emotion, the body believes it is going through that emotion. If there is anger, the clenching of the jaw, the fist, the movement, they all get stored in the body.” Sikdar, too, who has had a ringside view of both Irrfan Khan’s long career — in theatre and, later, film — and Babil’s nascent stabs at acting notes, “Acting is a volatile process, a total transformation of a person.”

These might be workplace hazards an actor signs up for, an unquestioning part of their daily grind, like coding or writing might result in terrible posture. After all, one cannot tell an actor to act “safely” but one can build a safe environment for them to act. The point is not to coddle, but to protect the artiste.

“We need to slow down a little bit, keep sane working hours, keep timelines slightly longer, so no one has to be up until 4 a.m. to finish a call sheet. I get it — on a film set, there is a lot of money involved. So why not set realistic deadlines? Make Sundays being off a thing? It might cost more money, but in the long run people will burn out and that will cost you more money,” Ira notes. Sikdar also suggests on-set counsellors, “Like an intimacy coordinator, it must be made mandatory by all platforms.”

Social media shifted the shape of fame and applied unique pressures on the mental health of artistes and those who derive their sense of identity from it. The suicide of influencer Misha Agrawal stems from this demand for constant validation, while the rape threats that Apoorva Mukhija received, forcing her to scale back her online presence, speaks to the untamed nature of this virtual fame. Today, actors are even cast based on their social media following and brand deals are brokered based on what whiff which account is giving.

“When we started, we were not expected to be totally ready for the camera. We had this luxury of learning on set. The present generation does not have that, with respect to grooming and cracking an audition,” Chetan notes. They must appear fully formed — an illusion that social media helps construct.

When a job requires a person to be chronically online, but the sources of validation — the comments section, the message requests — are sites of hostility, rage and trolling, what does a person do?

Ira Khan herself faced her fair share of trolling when her wedding was scrutinised down to the carpet choices. “See, I didn’t read any of them. I didn’t even know we were being trolled until much later.” But there is always a trade-off between being informed and being safe, which many actors are not in the position of taking. To be informed, is to risk danger.

Through the founding of the Agatsu Foundation, Ira got in touch with practitioners who have been at it for decades, informing her of the broad strides made — where therapy has become common in certain circles and the taboo has been erased to a certain extent, at least with the younger generation. The Nadigar Sangam, or South Indian Artistes’ Association, for example, even offers mental health services. “We have come a long way, even if we also have a long way to go,” Ira notes.

To read more exclusive stories from The Hollywood Reporter India's May-June 2025 print issue, pick up a copy of the magazine from your nearest book store or newspaper stand.

To buy the digital issue of the magazine, please click here.