Combating the Crisis: Zeb Chadfield Talks Mental Health with PremiumBeat

The Finish Line began with a core conviction: Post-production artists can prioritise their mental health and still produce great work. Our founder, Zeb Chadfield’s vision helped create a space where artists can thrive, while growing the business year on year. 

And, with the mental health crisis impacting the vast majority of post-production professionals, he’s hoping others will follow suit. 

Zeb has continued to advocate for fixes to the mental health crisis in the post-production industry, and for the embrace of neurodiversity among its workers. He was recently featured in PremiumBeat where he shared five actionable ways post-production artists can prioritize their mental health. Read an excerpt of the piece below:

5 Tips for Managing Mental Health in Post-Production

Almost 90% of off-screen film and TV professionals in the UK have experienced mental health issues on the job. If you look around your office (physical or virtual), that’s nine out of ten people you’ve ever worked with.

That statistic begs the question: How did this get so bad? To answer that question, and discover actionable solutions, we spoke with Zeb Chadfield, founder of The Finish Line.

In 2011, Chadfield suffered a nervous breakdown that led him to reevaluate his life and work. He went on to start The Finish Line with the goal of providing a space where artists could work and grow, while keeping mental health their priority.

Chadfield says that one of the biggest problems in the industry is long working hours, and just how normalized those hours have become. That problem is compounded by things like widespread imposter syndrome, making artists feel they should simply be lucky to have a job. 

The issue is vast and complex, but there are steps everyone—whether studio heads or budding artists—can take to put mental health first. 

Read the full PremiumBeat story here.