Hollywood’s Mental Health Crisis: How Job Losses Are Impacting Industry Executives As LinkedIn Is Labeled A “Pit Of Despair”

Editor’s note: The latest a series of Deadline reports looking at how the challenges facing the media & entertainment industry are impacting mental health.

One calls LinkedIn a “pit of despair.” Another feels an overwhelming lack of purpose. Yet another groused about simply feeling stuck.

For myriad Hollywood executives who have lost their jobs over the past year, finding work has not been the only challenge they’ve have had to overcome. It’s also the feeling of hopelessness that come with being out of the game with little to no promise of ever returning.

“It’s almost a state of panic because this industry is so challenged,” lamented one out-of-work TV executive. “I was having these chest pains and for a second I thought, is this my heart? But ultimately, it was panic. I went to see my doctor who did a bunch of tests and everything is ultimately fine. But he asked, ‘Do you want to talk to somebody?’ And I was like, ‘Listen, I know what the issue is.’ I didn’t feel like I needed to go talk to a therapist. I know what the issue is and a therapist isn’t going to help me find a job.”

“The days are long,” adds a jobless woman with decades of experience in marketing. “I am bored. And it’s hard for me because all my friends work, even my friends that are not in the industry. Everybody works. I am kind of miserable.”

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A highly experienced but unemployed suit, who like the other execs asked Deadline to not use his name for fear it would impact his job search, said the daily barrage of headlines about contraction in Hollywood don’t do his psyche any favors. With the state’s Employment Development Department reporting losses of more than 12,000 entertainment jobs from May 2023 to May 2024 — coupled with threats of even more layoffs at Warner Bros, Paramount and Disney — help-wanted signs are not exactly plastered all over the studios these days. 

“I mean, look, you can only go through so many rounds of interviews where you are easily an exceptionally qualified person before you realize there are more people out there than positions,” the suit said. “Am I more hirable now as a mid-50s senior executive who hasn’t worked in two years than I was two years ago?”

“Eight Out Of 10 Clients Don’t Even Recognize They’re Grieving”

What he and the other out-of-work executives are experiencing are various levels of grief — a process that can be painful but should never be overlooked, advises career coach Laverne McKinnon.

“Grief is an experience that’s not specific to death,” says McKinnon, who specializes in working with members of the entertainment and tech industries. “Grief is the normal reaction to any type of loss, including loss of career, loss of industry. And I think many people don’t recognize how they are grieving. I’m going to say eight out of 10 clients don’t even recognize that they’re grieving because it’s not like someone died. And so they have a lot of shame around how they’re feeling and why they’re feeling so helpless, hopeless and powerless. And it’s like, there’s a reason why this is part of the mourning process, because this thing that you love, this thing that you identified with, this thing that you are attached to, it no longer exists.

“When one is not given permission to grieve or even acknowledge their grief, it leads to a loss of resiliency,” added McKinnon. “And whether someone chooses to try to return to the entertainment industry or pivot to a new career, resiliency is required for any type of job search as well as long-term career success and fulfillment. Take the opportunity to reground oneself in your values and in your purpose so that you can make a decision from a place of empowerment as opposed to helpless, hopelessness and powerlessness.

“I think this past year has been one of the toughest,” said top Hollywood executive recruiter Jamie Waldron, Senior Partner, Global Head of Sports, Media + Entertainment, at Modern Executive Solutions. “It’s the toughest I’ve seen since probably around 2009 when it was really tough, too. I think it’s my biggest challenge as a recruiter to make sure that, to the boundaries that I can do it, people feel good and don’t have this ‘the world is ending and there’s no hope’ [feeling], because good people always get hired. A lot of times, candidates who become unemployed think either they’re never going to get another job or especially, if they’re later in their career, ‘Oh my God, this is it and this is the end.’ It’s getting them past that. It’s not a doom factor, it’s not a crisis, and it will get better.”

Just don’t ask how long the job search will take because coaches like McKinnon can’t say. 

“No one has experienced the acute level of uncertainty that people are living with today. Our minds literally cannot tolerate not knowing,” says McKinnon. “So when clients ask me that question, all I can say is, ‘I don’t know. We don’t know.’ If anyone tells you an answer, it’s like they’re just pulling information out of their ass, which is why I always go back to values and life purpose, because there are choices to be made. You have to go inward, not outward, in order to make those decisions. The hope comes from using this pause as an opportunity to do that personal development work. Some people love it and embrace it, other people are really resistant because they’re like, ‘Just tell me what I need to do, even if I have to run back to back marathons.’ And I’m like, ‘No one can tell you that. This is an opportunity to use the pause to get really clear on what’s important to you.’ ”

That’s what happened for Karen Jones, a veteran PR executive who left HBO in 2022 after 23 years with the company. She took a year to decide what to do next.

“It was just a deep amount of reflection,” recalls Jones. “I didn’t take it lightly. I was in therapy. I was talking to my family, trusted advisors. I was talking to my financial manager. I mean, there were many different factors, both internal and external that went into it. But ultimately, I had always known that I wanted to do something else, that I wanted to have another chapter.”

She now works as a career coach and advises folks who are both employed and out of work in Hollywood. 

“People sometimes will say ‘Gosh, you seem like you’ve just figured it all out and made this pivot,” Jones says. “I’ve tried to be very transparent about what the journey of the in-between feels like. It is messy. It is uncertain, and you can’t power your way through it. You have to give it some space in order to transition to something else, or even when you find a new opportunity to not still be carrying the baggage of whatever it was that you left behind.”

You have to give it some space in order to transition to something else, or even when you find a new opportunity to not still be carrying the baggage of whatever it was that you left behind.

Karen Jones

Longtime producer Robert Morton, who is best known for running Late Night and The Late Show with David Letterman in the ’80s and 90s, still carried some of that baggage when he made a successful transition to real estate a decade ago. Although he quickly realized that his talents were transferrable — he still solves crises, and instead of looking at ratings each morning, he looks at what’s sold and what remains on the market — he admits his Hollywood ego used to get in the way.

“It was seeing my name as the first credit on a roll on every show that I did, to seeing my name on a real estate sign on Sundays, advertising an open house,” remembers Morton. “There was a bit of an ego thing there where I thought, ‘Oh f*ck. Everybody that I impressed in my old business, they’re seeing these signs in front of the Brentwood Country Mart. They’re seeing these signs in the Palisades.’ It’s where the concentration of all of the successes in the business lives. And there was a moment where the ego hurt.”

Then something changed. As he became more successful at selling, his former colleagues and friends were eager to learn his secret of living life outside of Hollywood.

“Every time I have an open house at a property, somebody comes by and says, ‘How did you do it? You’re so lucky. What do I have to do?’ And almost daily I get calls from peers in the entertainment business who say to me, ‘How do I do it? I want to get out.’ It’s like they’re in prison. I help them break out of the yard! I basically told him that you just got to be proud of whatever you do and don’t feel like you’re giving up something so precious and so wonderful.”