Mayim Bialik wants you … to heal yourself

Though the film and television industry may be in virtual lockdown, thanks to the protracted screenwriters’ strike, actress Mayim Bialik has found a way to be as busy off the set as on it.

The game show cohost of Jeopardy! , Bialik, who holds a doctorate in neuroscience (just like her iconic character, Amy Farrah Fowler, on the long-running smash series, The Big Bang Theory), is using her educational and personal experiences to advocate for a cause near and dear to her heart: mental health.

While other Jews in the entertainment world have talked candidly about their mental health struggles–Sarah Silverman, Nick Kroll, and Zach Braff, among others–Bialik has essentially taken on a second job as a mental health champion. She and her longtime partner, Jonathan Cohen, developed the podcast Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown during the height of the COVID pandemic to help “democratize access to mental health,” as she put it, in recorded responses to a Jewish Chicago interview.

She and Cohen, Bialik said, began observing an uptick in the numbers of people coping with anxiety and depression brought on by the stressors of isolation and the fear of disease. Those with “no conscious history with mental health challenges,” she said, complained about the inability to sleep, difficulty eating, and pressure in their chest-all telltale signs of stress. More than 20 million users have downloaded Breakdown to glean insights from Bialik and her guests-Hollywood friends and clinical experts-on “what has worked [and] what hasn’t worked” to alleviate mental anguish.

Over the years, Bialik has talked widely on her own mental health struggles, which, she said, date back to her teen years, when her “[l]ife was becoming increasingly difficult and complicated and unmanageable.” The title star of the TV sitcom Blossom at that time, Bialik sought professional treatment-and she has continued to do so for the past three decades or so.

“Recovery [from mental health challenges] is not a linear process,” she observed. It is “one that I will be taking part in for the rest of my life.”

Psychotherapist David Lipschutz, LCSW, who is the new director of the Response for Teens program at JCFS Chicago, applauded Bialik and other personalities for putting “a spotlight on mental health and mental illness.” There has been a spike in the number of Americans, particularly young people, suffering from addictive and compulsive behaviors, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and negative self-worth, and separation from families and friends during COVID “heightened the state of fear and anxiety” for many, he said. Bialik’s and others’ efforts to “take away some of the stigma and shame” by acknowledging their personal struggles and seeking help should be viewed as positive steps for our society.

Addressing that question of stigma, Bialik said that Americans “like a good story with a happy ending … [because] people are really uncomfortable with people’s uncomfortable feelings.” Many of us just want to pop a pill, do a little therapy, find a religious solution, and hope that our problems will vanish. But mental health doesn’t work that way. The path to well-being is messier and more complicated, but that “that type of journey is not attractive. … [It’s] hard to sell that as a story line,” she said.

Bialik remains committed to that story line, however, because it’s embedded in her Jewish DNA. Like many Jews, she said, she has wrestled with the big questions of meaning and existence–of “why God placed me here.” Perhaps, she has considered, it’s about being of service to others. Working to ease other’s suffering by sharing her own “is a way of potentially bringing tikkun, or repair, to a world that’s very fractured,” she said.