Mental Health Coordination for Stage and Screen
Working at the Intersection of Mental Health and Creative Storytelling
By Amanda M. Edwards, LPC
We know that stories can affect mental health. It’s time to talk about the mental health of the people making them.
Film, television, and theatre ask people to do extraordinary things.
Performers may be asked to embody trauma, violence, grief, mental illness, abuse, addiction, or experiences that intersect deeply with their own lives.
Writers and directors wrestle with how to tell difficult stories authentically and responsibly.
Crews work long hours under intense pressure.
Educators prepare emerging artists for industries in which vulnerability is often considered part of the job.
And historically, when the psychological demands of that work became overwhelming, our industry had surprisingly few systems designed to help.
Mental Health Coordination offers another way.
MENTAL HEALTH COORDINATION FOR STAGE AND SCREEN: WORKING AT THE INTERSECTION OF MENTAL HEALTH AND CREATIVE STORYTELLING introduces the emerging field of Mental Health Coordination and provides practical, evidence-informed tools for creating safer, more sustainable, and more human creative environments.
Available now from Routledge.
What Is Mental Health Coordination?
Mental Health Coordination sits at the intersection of mental health, creative storytelling, psychological safety, and production practice.
A Mental Health Coordinator isn’t simply a therapist who happens to be on set.
The work is preventative as much as it is responsive.
It asks us to consider psychological risk before harm occurs, build systems that support consent and agency, prepare thoughtfully for challenging material, create pathways for navigating concerns, support people experiencing distress, and examine the conditions within creative environments that contribute to psychological safety—or undermine it.
This book provides both the why and the how.
Drawing from neuroscience, Polyvagal Theory, trauma-informed practice, consent-based frameworks, restorative approaches, and real-world creative practice, it examines how our understanding of mental health can fundamentally change the way we make art.
Why I Wrote This Book
For years, I’ve worked in two worlds that don’t always speak the same language.
As a Licensed Professional Counselor, I understand trauma, nervous systems, relationships, mental health, and the conditions people need in order to feel safe enough to function, connect, and create.
As a Mental Health Coordinator and Intimacy Coordinator/Director, I understand the realities of creative spaces: deadlines, budgets, hierarchies, artistic risk, vulnerable performances, long days, complicated power dynamics, and the enormous number of people required to bring a story to life.
Eventually, the question became unavoidable:
What would happen if we brought those worlds together?
Not by turning rehearsal rooms into therapy rooms.
Not by diagnosing artists.
Not by eliminating artistic risk or difficult storytelling.
But by asking better questions about how that work gets done.
What if psychological safety were considered during pre-production rather than after something went wrong?
What if we could identify psychological risk in a script just as we identify physical, stunt, or intimacy considerations?
What if performers had practical tools for entering and leaving emotionally demanding material?
What if productions established clear pathways for concerns before someone needed them?
What if mental health representation benefited from the same thoughtful consultation increasingly expected around other areas of identity and lived experience?
And what if supporting the people making the story actually made the creative work more sustainable, not less ambitious?
This book grew from those questions.
This Isn’t a Book About Making Art “Safe”
Art shouldn’t always be comfortable.
Some of our most important stories explore grief, violence, trauma, oppression, sexuality, mental illness, addiction, death, conflict, and the parts of human experience we’d sometimes rather avoid.
Psychological safety doesn’t mean removing difficult material.
It means creating enough structure, information, agency, communication, and support that people can engage with difficult material without unnecessary harm.
The distinction matters.
Mental Health Coordination isn’t about asking artists to take fewer creative risks.
It’s about building better containers in which they can take them.
Inside the Book
Mental Health Coordination for Stage and Screen moves from theory into application.
You’ll explore the science of safety and connection, trauma within the creative process, consent and agency, ethics and scope of practice, collaboration across departments, conflict navigation, cultural change, mental health portrayal, working with marginalized populations, and practical approaches to supporting psychologically demanding creative work.
Most importantly, the book asks:
What do we actually do with this information on Monday morning?
Throughout the book, you’ll find practical approaches for:
- identifying psychological risks within scripts and creative material
- preparing for high-intensity or potentially activating content
- establishing consent-forward practices
- creating community agreements
- identifying and supporting access needs
- developing clear concern-navigation pathways
- collaborating across production departments
- supporting performers and crew without practicing therapy in the workplace
- navigating conflict and rupture
- incorporating restorative practices
- developing healthier production cultures
- supporting sustainable creative work
- approaching portrayals of mental illness with greater accuracy and care
- integrating Mental Health Coordination throughout pre-production, production, rehearsal, performance, and post-production
The goal is not simply to understand Mental Health Coordination.
It’s to begin practicing it.
Practical Tools You Can Actually Use
Theory matters.
But theory isn’t particularly helpful when you’re standing in a rehearsal room wondering what to do next.
That’s why this book was designed with implementation in mind.
Readers also receive access to companion resources that translate the frameworks in the book into practical tools for creative environments, including:
- worksheets
- assessment templates
- reporting forms
- safety protocols
- concern-navigation resources
- dramaturgical collaboration tools
- restorative-practice resources
- mental health portrayal tools
These resources are designed to help move Mental Health Coordination from an interesting idea into something that can actually become part of a production’s workflow.
Who Is This Book For?
You don’t need to be a therapist to care about mental health in creative spaces.
And you don’t need to become a Mental Health Coordinator to use many of the practices in this book.
Aspiring & Practicing Mental Health Coordinators
Build a foundation for understanding the role, ethics, scope, tools, and practical application of Mental Health Coordination across film, television, and theatre.
Intimacy Professionals
Explore the natural intersections between consent-based intimacy practice and psychological safety, including collaboration around emotionally complex material and performer care.
Directors, Producers & Creative Leaders
Learn how production structures, communication, power, preparation, and culture influence psychological safety, and what leaders can practically do about it.
Stage Managers & Production Professionals
Develop tools for boundaries, concern navigation, communication, conflict, and responding to mental health needs without being expected to become the production’s therapist.
Dramaturgs, Writers & Storytellers
Explore mental health portrayal, challenging content, content notes, psychological risk, lived-experience consultation, and the ways dramaturgy and Mental Health Coordination can collaborate.
Mental Health Professionals
Learn how clinical knowledge can (and importantly, cannot) translate into creative workplaces, including the ethical and scope-of-practice distinctions between therapy and Mental Health Coordination.
Educators & Students
Use the book as a framework for teaching and learning about psychological safety, trauma-informed creative practice, consent, ethical leadership, film and theatre production, arts leadership, and sustainable creative practice.
Healing-Forward Creative Practice
Being trauma-informed is an important beginning.
But I believe we can go further.
Rather than only asking:
“How do we avoid causing harm?”
we can also ask:
“What conditions help human beings do difficult creative work well?”
That means thinking about consent.
Access.
Information.
Physical and psychological safety.
Connection.
Agency.
Conflict.
Rest.
Recovery.
Community.
And the nervous systems of the actual human beings in the room.
I call this healing-forward creative practice.
It doesn’t mean productions become responsible for healing people’s trauma.
It means we can intentionally create environments that don’t require people to sacrifice their well-being in order to make meaningful art.
About the Author
Amanda M. Edwards, LPC
Amanda M. Edwards is a Licensed Professional Counselor, author, educator, Mental Health Coordinator, and Certified Intimacy Coordinator/Director working at the intersection of mental health and creative storytelling.
She is the Co-Founder and President of the Association of Mental Health Coordinators (AMHC), where she has helped develop training, standards, tools, and ethical frameworks for the emerging field of Mental Health Coordination.
Amanda’s work integrates trauma-informed practice, Polyvagal Theory, consent, psychological safety, nervous-system regulation, restorative approaches, and practical production processes.
In addition to her clinical and production work, she teaches at the college level and provides training and consultation for entertainment professionals, educators, organizations, and creative teams seeking more psychologically sustainable ways of working.
Mental Health Coordination for Stage and Screen brings those worlds together into a practical framework for anyone who believes we can make extraordinary art without treating psychological harm as an inevitable cost of the creative process.
Mental Health Belongs in the Creative Process.
We’ve gotten much better at recognizing that the way we make art matters.
Now it’s time to expand that conversation.
Not because artists are fragile.
Not because difficult stories shouldn’t be told.
And not because every uncomfortable experience is harmful.
But because people do their most courageous creative work when they have enough safety, agency, information, connection, and support to take meaningful risks.
That’s the work of Mental Health Coordination.
This book is an invitation to begin.
Mental Health Coordination for Stage and Screen
Working at the Intersection of Mental Health and Creative Storytelling
Amanda M. Edwards
Published by Routledge | 2026
ISBN: 978-1-041-07017-7
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