Tom Holland’s Therapists Find Social Media Was Bad For Him
Mental Health Awareness Month has been observed in May in the United States since 1949. According to the American Psychiatric Association, one third of American adults admitted that social media negatively affects their mental health and 38% of teens say they feel overwhelmed by social media. In fact, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram are the platforms that can most negatively affect one’s mental health, yet 80% of the population uses those platforms daily. New data from the CDC’s Youth Behavioral Survey shows that the percentage of high school students who felt persistently sad or hopeless has increased from 2011-2021 and Black students were more likely to attempt suicide. In a survey conducted last year by the nonprofit YouthTruth, middle school students (50%) and high school students (56%) cited feeling depressed, stressed or anxious as their number one obstacle to learning.
Tom Holland has been sober for over a year. The actor explained in a new interview, that working on his new Apple TV+ miniseries, ‘The Crowded Room,’ changed how he thinks about mental health and helped him understand his own triggers. Holland said nine months into filming he found himself struggling to separate himself from the character, saying, “I remember having a bit of a meltdown at home and thinking, like, ‘I’m going to shave my head. I need to shave my head because I need to get rid of this character.’ I’m no stranger to the physical aspects of the job, doing the whole action-movie thing, but the mental aspect, it really beat me up and it took a long time for me to recover afterward, to sort of get back to reality.”
After talking to therapists, Holland said he learned to identify what triggers and stresses him out, like social media.
The first three episodes of the series will air on Apple TV+ on June 9.
