On weekdays, you can catch actor Maurice Benard on “General Hospital,” where he’s been playing mob boss Sonny Corinthos for close to 30 years. On Sundays, though, you’ll find him on YouTube, sitting in the studio built by his wife where he interviews friends, castmates and family members about a variety of subjects that are, most often, related to mental health.
“State of Mind,” Benard’s weekly web series, began in the midst of what were some of the darkest days of the pandemic for the actor and has developed into a powerful outlet for his work as a mental health advocate.
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“It started one night, I was in bed. I woke up and I had an anxiety attack and decided to film it,” Benard recalls on a recent phone call. At the same time, he saw Steve Hardy on television cracking a joke about how people film everything they do and post to Instagram. “I thought, oh my God, here I am doing it,” he says. After that incident, Benard started posting weekly talks about his own mental health to Instagram before moving over to YouTube where he’s built a following of over 70,000 subscribers.
“A lot of the fans were from ‘General Hospital,’ but then ‘State of Mind’ started getting its own fans, which is interesting now,” he says. “A lot of people just talk to me about mental health, not ‘General Hospital,’ which is amazing. I’m so proud of that.”
Early on in the pandemic, Benard released his memoir “Nothing General About It: How Love (and Lithium) Saved Me On and Off ‘General Hospital.’” Meanwhile, production on the long-running, daytime soap opera had halted production in the wake of COVID-19.
“During my book and the shutdown of GH and the pandemic, I got this anxiety that was deadly,” he says. “Horrific. I’m talking, every day, not wanting to be on this earth. I went through that for four months, while I was promoting my book.”
Still, he continued with his mental health updates. “It was very difficult, but every Sunday, I went and did ‘State of Mind’ in the car,” Benard says. “I only missed Sunday when, literally, I couldn’t get out of bed. Then, after four months of that crippling feeling, I got help. Professional help.”
Benard, who has bipolar disorder, has been speaking about mental health for years. His “General Hospital” character, Sonny, also struggles with bipolar disorder. “When I started playing Sonny as bipolar, people didn’t know what that was,” says Benard.
But he says soap operas are uniquely capable of handling challenging real-world topics. That’s allowed the show to explore Sonny’s struggles in storylines that pan out over the course of weeks or months and have remained part of the canon for decades.
“The soap opera does these topics better than anybody because you can do it in real time,” Benard says.
Recently, viewers have seen the beloved character stop drinking in order to better care for his mental health. “A lot of people have been on me about the drinking, Sonny drinking, forever. You shouldn’t drink on medication,” says Benard. He brought that up with the show’s executive producer, Frank Valentini, who incorporated it into the show.
“I’ve done quite a bit of stories and it does really educate people,” says Benard, noting that Sonny’s recent mental health struggles were close to what he has experienced. “The way they wrote it was real accurate.”
“State of Mind” allows Benard to keep the conversation about mental health going in a different fashion than on “General Hospital.” He speaks candidly about his personal experiences and gently encourages guests to do the same in interviews that seem more like intimate conversations. Benard says he approaches the interviews like conversations on a first date.
“If you’re watching ‘State of Mind’ and you are mentally ill and you don’t talk about it, you may watch and go, ‘That’s exactly how I feel’ and ‘He just said exactly what I want to say,’” Benard explains. “Then you may not feel as alone, which is a beautiful thing. “
The web series came together at a poignant time. Earlier this year, the World Health Organization released a brief indicating that there had been a 25% increase in anxiety and depression globally in the year following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Benard says he believes that the pandemic led to a situation where people “couldn’t run” from mental health issues. “People who were feeling this for the first time, I feel sorry for them, because they were probably scared,” he says. “You couldn’t leave the house. You were stuck in your house.”
For Benard, the stay-at-home period led to challenges as well. “With me, I tried not to have my kids ever see me in that state,” he says. “During the pandemic, I had no choice, because I couldn’t run away, so, they had to see me in that—no pun intended—state of mind. It’s tough.”
But he says the pandemic has also raised awareness surrounding mental health and perhaps as a result the audience for “State of Mind” has grown. How it will continue to grow, though, remains to be seen.
“The more people you reach, the more people you help,” says Benard.
But there’s something to be said about keeping the show in its current niche.
“This is kind of like my baby and that’s why I think people feel more safe, because it’s not a big deal, it’s its own little thing,” he says. “I just love where I’m at.”
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