Last night I was sitting in my Mum’s lounge in Adelaide, out here visiting family, watching an interesting documentary on mental health in Australia. The credits rolled and I just sat in the dark for a while, thinking. Not about the festival posters or the Beatport charts or whichever hype cycle is currently doing the rounds. Just about the people. The ones I’ve lost, the ones I miss, and the ones who are still here but quietly not really here.
I’ve seen too many close friends, promoters, DJs, agency heads, label managers, road crew and quiet support staff slip out of this world over the decades. Each one of them still cuts me very deep, and I think about them often, more often than I let on, and I miss them in ways that don’t get easier with time. So before anything else: this is not a finger-pointing piece. This is not me sitting in judgement of any of the brilliant people working hard on this stuff. This is me asking, out loud, whether what we are collectively doing is actually reaching the people who need it.
The reason I’m writing this now is timing. In the UK, Mental Health Awareness Week runs from 11 to 17 May 2026, and the theme set by the Mental Health Foundation is, pointedly, Action. Awareness, in their framing, is no longer enough on its own. I think they are exactly right, and I think our industry needs to hear that quite loudly.
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William Orbit and the Sound That Changed EverythingWe have, as a scene, been talking about mental health for the better part of the last decade and a bit. Decoded Magazine ran a piece by Paul Thomas in July 2015 called “The reality of depression within the electronic music industry,” in which Paul spoke candidly with Funkagenda (Adam Walder), with the sister of the late Slacker about her brother Shem, and with others who had lived the thing from the inside. Reading it back now, what stops me isn’t how much has changed. It’s how much hasn’t. The same loneliness on the road. The same grinning masks. The same belief, common to almost every working DJ I’ve ever known, that admitting to the lows would somehow take the lights down on the highs. Paul’s article was ahead of its time. The conversations it helped seed have since multiplied across every corner of our industry, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes loudly, sometimes lost entirely in the noise.
And that, really, is the question I keep coming back to. Much has been done. Genuinely, much has been done. I cannot even state how much the industry has opened up over the years. But is any of it actually reaching the people who need it most?
Walk me through it for a moment. A young promoter in Newcastle is having one of those weeks. A second sold-out night turned into a half-empty room, an artist cancelled, the bar take is short and the venue is breathing down his neck. The thought of why the fuck does one keep doing this? Friends who said they would turn up – Don’t! Your partner is pissed you lost money again, but you can never explain the passion – you feel like a failure. You can’t post this on Facebook or Instagram, you need to show a smiling face, a facade of success, but deep down, you know are not making it. Most can’t reach out to another promoter who understands and talk it through. You know it takes time to succeed, but when?
He pulls out his phone at three in the morning, alone in a flat, deflated, half hungover, half cut, looking for help on where to turn. Where exactly does he go? The internet is full of pages of help, but that’s what you need when feeling so down.
AFEM, the Association For Electronic Music, has a brilliant Health page with helplines for the UK, the Netherlands, the US and worldwide, plus the AFEM Mental Health Guide, harm reduction guidance and a Member Assistance Programme. Music Minds Matter offers a free 24/7 line on 0808 802 8008. Tonic Rider, run by Tonic Music for Mental Health, has been quietly doing essential work with musicians and industry professionals for years. In the US, MusiCares has just partnered with the JED Foundation on a new tier of mental health resources, and Universal Music Group together with Music Health Alliance have launched a Music Industry Mental Health Fund providing direct financial support for treatment access. Outfront Media has partnered with Creators 4 Mental Health for Mental Health Awareness Month in the US. There are music industry therapist networks, with the team at Music Industry Therapists & Coaches even launching a dedicated Electronic Music Executive Stress Management Programme. And on it goes.
It is, in many ways, an embarrassment of riches. Which is also, paradoxically, the problem.
Because if you are at the bottom of the well at three in the morning, you do not have the energy to compare directories. You do not have the bandwidth to work out which charity covers which territory, which programme is for “professionals” and which for “members,” which helpline picks up at what hour, or whether you qualify for any of it at all. Choice paralysis is a luxury for the well. The unwell need one number. Maybe two. Pinned somewhere they can find them at the worst possible moment, in a state that has nothing to do with rational decision-making, but knowing the person at the other end…… understands!
So the first conversation I would love us all to have, calmly and without ego, is about consolidation and signposting. Not building yet another initiative, but pointing harder at the brilliant ones that already exist. Pooling resources rather than racing each other for headlines. AFEM’s stance has always struck me as quietly the right one, and I’d love to see more agencies, labels, promoters and platforms simply funnel attention there, or to Music Minds Matter in the UK, or MusiCares in the US, rather than trying to invent the wheel each May.
Which brings me to the music media, including, candidly, us. Should every electronic music publication carry a permanent, prominent link to mental health resources? I think the answer is yes, and I include Decoded Magazine in that. Not a banner that goes up for one week in May and quietly disappears in June. A footer link, a homepage tile, a line in every artist interview where somebody is asked, properly, how they are doing. The big publications already do versions of this. The smaller ones, ourselves included, can do more, and we will. It costs nothing. It saves lives. There is no editorial argument against it. Collectively, ALL Music Media should be working together. We have the resources to work together and help the organisations and the industry.
Should record labels be pushing this? Of course they should, and many already do. But there is a meaningful difference between a tasteful Mental Health Awareness Week post on a label’s Instagram and the actual structural support that comes from artist contracts, tour budgets, day-rate floors, label manager wellness training and the simple act of asking a producer, in person, whether they are okay before pushing them onto a third remix deadline in eight weeks. Talking about it is the cheap part. Building it into how we do business is the hard part. The labels who are already doing the second thing tend not to make a fuss about it, which is probably as it should be.
Then there is the much bigger question, and I’m aware this one will land awkwardly in a few inboxes. Should Beatport, Bandcamp, Spotify and SoundCloud (and many more) be doing more? They are, between them, the front door of our industry. They are where artists upload their identity, their livelihood, sometimes their last bit of self-worth. They have the data. They see the artist who hasn’t logged in for 6 weeks. They see the dropping engagement. They see the abandoned profile after years of consistent uploads. I am not suggesting anyone should be data-mining for distress, nor am I naive about the legal and ethical thickets involved. But a small, persistent, well-funded link to mental health resources in every artist dashboard, in every fan-facing footer, would cost these companies almost nothing and would normalise help-seeking in a way that no awareness campaign ever can. Spotify in particular, given its size and the ferocity of debate around streaming economics, has both the means and arguably the moral case to do more. If you accept that the platforms have helped reshape artists’ working lives, you have to accept some accountability for what those working lives now feel like.
I can already hear someone reading this saying that funding is the issue, and they would be correct. Outreach is expensive. Properly resourced helplines are expensive. Putting clinicians on retainer for an entire industry is expensive. The honest truth is that mental health support in our scene is currently being held together by an underpaid handful of charities, a network of generous therapists, a couple of associations doing more than their funding suggests they should be able to, and the personal labour of survivors who keep telling their stories so that someone else might not feel alone. That is not a sustainable funding model. It is a moral one being asked to carry an industrial load.
Which is why, if you are a label boss, an agency owner, a promoter, a platform executive or a brand sponsor reading this, the practical action I’d ask of you this month is small and concrete. Pick one of the organisations I’ve named above. Make a contribution that is not about your logo appearing in a press release. Quietly, properly, fund the work. ArtsQuest’s Musikfest Music Industry Conference in August 2026 is putting wellbeing on its agenda again. Ticket Fairy has been writing thoughtfully about how mindfulness and self-care are reshaping festival audiences. AFEM continues to share lived-experience health stories on its site so that artists at the bottom of their own well can read another artist’s words and feel, for a moment, less alone. None of that happens for free.
I want to say something else, and I think this is the bit I most need to say, both as an editor and as somebody who has watched friends not make it to the morning. Depression and mental health is not a race to out-do each other. It is not a content category. It is not a quarterly campaign. It is not who can post the most heartfelt black-and-white tile on the right Tuesday in May. It is not a personal-brand exercise. The instinct to perform our suffering, or to perform our sympathy, is one of the more uncomfortable side effects of social media on our scene, and I would gently ask all of us, myself included, to resist it. The people I have lost did not need a campaign. They needed a friend, a number that worked, a colleague who noticed, an industry that didn’t make them feel disposable. We can all be one of those things to someone this week, and the week after, and the week after that.
If you ask me where to turn, where the trustworthy starting points are for our specific corner of the music world, I would point you, without hesitation, at AFEM’s Health page, at Music Minds Matter in the UK, Support Act in Australia and at MusiCares in the US. Save those three links. Pin them somewhere. Send them to the friend you have been quietly worried about. That is, in the end, what this week is asking of us. Not a louder conversation. A more useful one.
I think often about Shem, about Keith, about a handful of names I will not list here because they belong to families and not to columns. I think about the bookings that fell through, the relationships that frayed, the small kindnesses I did not extend in time and the ones I did. I think about how much of our industry runs on people who are quietly not okay. And I think, on the better days, that we are a community capable of looking after our own, if we choose to.
This month, please choose to. Reach out to your friends, ask if they are ok and learn more about the warning signs of depression and how to help.
If you need some resources, please see below
Suicide Prevention (Worldwide)
Hub of Hope (UK)
Mental Health First Aid (Worldwide)
Music Minds Matter (UK): T: 0808 802 8008
Shout (UK)/ Text: 85258
Suicide Prevention Line (USA)
Suicide Prevention Line (Netherlands)
Support Act Wellbeing Helpline (1800 959 500): A free, confidential, 24/7 service staffed by experienced clinicians for artists, crew, and music workers in Australia
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