The Growing Trend of Artists Taking Breaks for Mental Health: An Inside Look

Stromae recently ended their tour. Scottish singer Lewis Capaldi has also just announced a break to take a rest. Like them, more and more artists need to stop to preserve their sanity.

There was Lomepal, Stromae, and very recently Lewis Capaldi. More and more artists say they are flushed, exhausted, unable to continue, and decide to interrupt a tour or put their career on hold, to rest and take care of their mental health. If the phenomenon is not completely new, it continues to grow.

“There is a fairly recent realization that an artist at the level of Stromae must take care of himself like a top athlete,” notes clinical psychologist Sophie Bellet-Vinson.

This ex-manager of artists created 4 years ago with the psychiatrist Emma Barron theInsaartt, the Institute for the care and support of artists and technicians. In particular, the organization carried out a study on the psychological impact of the conditions in which performing arts work is exercised. Because if the stars who crack make the headlines, they are not the only ones to be victims of burn-out.

The study highlights the difficulty of the working conditions of all the players in the sector, with sometimes deleterious consequences for physical and mental health. Lack of sleep and irregular rhythms during rounds are therefore important risk factors.

“A rather strange work rhythm”

“The conditions for exercising these professions” constitute a breeding ground for burnouts, points out Sophie Bellet-Vinson. “Sleep is often undermined, the rhythms of life, food, travel, the pressure of success. It’s very trying for the person who lives them.” The psychologist also evokes a “very strong mental load”, for artists of the stature of Stromae.

“There is a work rhythm which is quite strange, it is exactly the opposite of office hours. We play a lot in the evening and on weekends”, also mentions the singer Suzanne Combo, general delegate of the Music Artists Guildand member of the collective Treatmentwhich wants to raise awareness about mental health among artists.

“What is difficult in big tours like those of Stromae is that we arrive very early at the concert venue and that we play very late”, she notes.

“There’s a lot of beat between the first soundcheck and the real concert,” she adds. “You have to know how to occupy that time. It creates somewhat strange moments, of solitude. We are like in a waiting room, as if we were wasting our time a little.” Suzanne Combo also mentions the quality of the food, “adjustment variable” of the budget of a tour.

Economic pressure

However, the stage is now a must for artists, and represents a growing share of a musician’s income. “Since the record industry has sold fewer records, even if streaming is taking a real place, it is the scene that allows artists to earn a living, and to exist”, notes Sophie Bellet- Vinson.

Economic pressure thus leads artists to embark on “very heavy and very tiring tours, which do not necessarily respect the rhythms of life and the health of the teams”. “It is not necessarily the responsibility of the productions”, however tempers the psychologist. “It may also be a responsibility of the artist. When it works well, he wants it to continue, he is in the movement.”

On stage, for several hours, the artist and his musicians give their all to offer the best possible show to the fans.

“A concert is very tiring, it’s a performance”, recalls Suzanne Combo. “Two hours spent on stage with your audience is hard on the body and the mind.”

“A form of uprooting”

And then it’s not just the stage, there are all these preparation periods, but also the movements, which are not always optimized. “You have to sleep in different cities, different places, even in a bus with the whole team, so in small berths with little privacy”, evokes the delegate from Guam.

The artist is away from home and family for weeks or even months. This is what Lewis Capaldi explained to his fans on Tuesday, to justify the cancellation of a series of concerts:

“I need to take these three weeks to (…) spend time with my family and do normal things – which allows me to get better”.

For the artist, the tours are moments a little out of time and out of reality. “It creates a form of uprooting, and at the same time also the fantasy that we have no more problems, no more bills and when we come back it hurts rather badly”, notes Suzanne Combo again.

“Touring life is great, it’s a bit like summer camps, but we don’t experience normal things,” testified Stromae on TF1, January 9, 2022.

“We are in a fairly festive environment, it is evening, people are partying, there is alcohol,” adds the delegate from the Guild of Music Artists.

“We got out of ‘sex, drugs and rock’n’roll'”

Alcohol, precisely, is one of the themes addressed in the studies of Insaart and Cura, just like drugs. If narcotics are more accessible than in other professions, they are however less glorified today. “For a long time the industry cultivated the image of the tortured artist and let him be tortured, thinking that something beautiful would come out of his ill-being. We are less in that fantasy”, evokes Suzanne Combo .

“We came out a bit of ‘sex, drugs and rock’n’roll’, with a somewhat morbid fascination for ill-being or for drugs”, confirms psychiatrist Jean-Victor Blanc, author of the book Pop & Psy (Plon).

Communication around the mental health of artists is slowly evolving, initiated in particular by Anglo-Saxon artists such as Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber, or Shawn Mendes, who have revealed their own troubles and difficulties.

“It comes mainly from the United States and the Anglo-Saxon world, notes Jean-Victor Blanc. In France, it’s starting, but it’s shy. There are still a lot of fears, in being associated with this cause”, underlines the psychiatrist, who founded you festival Pop & Psy aimed at raising public awareness on the subject of mental health. The event, which invites personalities to express themselves, thus suffered “a certain number of refusals from artists who were afraid of the subject”.

“A shrink so as not to freak out”

However, he notes very positive changes. “Musical artists today talk a lot, sing, write about their mental health, in the first person. What’s new is that they also talk about care, what helped them and they talk about it much more directly.”

Social networks thus allow artists to “speak directly to their mental health community”, evokes the psychiatrist, who quotes Whitney Houston or Britney Spears, for whom, in the 1990s “communication was locked”. At that time, “the stars did not have the opportunity to talk about these subjects”.

And then, some artists no longer hesitate to talk about it in the media. Lomepal, for example, decided in 2019 to take a break after the success of its two albums FLIP in 2017 and Jeannine in 2018 and a big tour, and told his approach frankly.

“I contacted a shrink so as not to freak out”, he thus confided to the Parisian.

Stromae dedicated a song, Hell, to the depression that struck him. And BigFlo and Oli have in 2022, when they release their album The others are us and after a 2-year break, confided that he got down to “unblocking the knots” by getting help. “We each have a shrink”, dropped the two Toulouse rappers at the microphone of Léa Salamé on France Inter.

But if the subject is “less taboo than before”, for Suzanne Combo, there are still many obstacles to speaking out, to awareness but also to access to care. “In the surveys carried out with our Cura collective, we note a problem of awareness of the malaise. The artist does not necessarily identify that he is not well and those around him do not always see the signals.”

“What are you complaining about?”

“The main reason is the difficulty in listening to what is going on in your body”, adds Sophie Bellet-Vinson. “As in other professions, you work, you put pressure on yourself. Professional exhaustion, burn-out, is when the body has been subjected to stress repeatedly, without allowing yourself any recovery time. .”

Difficult, moreover, for known artists to whom everything seems to succeed, to complain. “They think they don’t have the right, because people can’t understand: ‘you’re successful, you’re famous, what are you complaining about?'”, notes Suzanne Combo.

“It’s difficult for everyone to cross the door of a psychologist, but it is perhaps even more difficult for artists”, evokes Sophie Bellet-Vinson.

“But I have the feeling that they allow themselves more and more. In consultation, I have artists who wonder about the management of success, about how we manage with the public, who anticipate a little the difficulties they are faced with.”

Destiny d’Aviciithe young Swedish DJ, exhausted by concerts, consumed by anxiety and alcohol, who committed suicide in 2018 today serves as a safeguard. “More and more artists are prioritizing their mental health, where before everything was somewhat sacrificed on the altar of glory, fame or money”, underlines Jean-Victor Blanc.

“Today, many artists tell themselves that to keep up the pace, to hold a long career, you have to take care of yourself at some point.”

The music industry has also begun work on the issue. “In Canada, some labels are starting to offer a small envelope to allow artists to take care of their mental or physical health”, underlines Suzanne Combo, who also mentions, in France, regional initiatives of performance halls to establish a charter good practices for the respect of mental health”. The festival Les Nuits de Fourvière organizes a meeting on the “Risk prevention in live performance“.

“We feel more and more that there is an interest, a questioning. We have requests for appointments with record companies”, underlines Sophie Bellet-Vinson, who intervenes in particular in festivals to do prevention and information. “It is a questioning that the whole profession is beginning to take up”. But if the profession begins to move “it is difficult to mobilize the public authorities”, she regrets, considering that it is nevertheless “a real question of public health”.