Jonah Hill’s Stutz is an antidote to social media self-therapising

Jonah Hill is someone that has had really, really good therapy. So much so that he wants to make sure everyone can have the same as him too.

His latest project is Stutz, a Netflix documentary about his therapist, a quietly-spoken but impactful man named Phil Stutz, and the treatment he offers his patients in order for them to lead happier lives. Throughout the 90-minute film, we get insight into both Hill’s mental health struggles and Stutz’s own personal traumas, like a sort of real-life therapy session cum memoir. Interspersed between these moments are drawings Stutz makes on note cards, lines shaky from his decades-long Parkinsons diagnosis, that visualise the tools that, as Hill puts it, “changed my life.”

The tools, though named things like “The Shadow,” “Life Force” and “The Grateful Flow”, are actually incredibly simple. They’re classic psychotherapy concepts, with an emphasis on chiseling away to the root of our issues rather than diagnosing from the outside in. “Life Force”, for example, asks patients to work on the core tenants of physical health, our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with others, with the theory that once those houses are in order, wading through the muddy waters of what else is bothering us becomes far easier. Stutz, both the film and the man, takes its time, and in a world ruled by bite-sized information full of conflicting information just a mouse click away, there’s something oddly anomalous about the space Stutz gives to the practice of therapy.

While at this point we all know the worst thing we can do for our physical health is google our symptoms (a cold turns to terminal cancer with just a few bad clicks), not as much caution has been levied at the rise of social media mental health guidance. While discovering community and understanding from other people can be immeasurably helpful, especially when traditional routes of free mental health diagnosis are so inaccessible, there’s a concern that too many voices throwing conflicting information can hinder a quest for clarity rather than help it. TikTok therapists, some licensed, some not, may offer helpful guidance but often distill complex personal issues into a kind of broad populist umbrella of syndromes. And Twitter hot takers diagnose normal human interactions as signs of mental illness, like how having a crush doesn’t mean you have romantic interest just that you have an anxious attachment style, or that if you prefer cats to dogs it means you’re emotionally unavailable. It can be messy, confusing and, sometimes, completely unhelpful.

There’s an irony in Stutz essentially offering that same service, a therapist using a media platform to offer handy tips and tricks, but with Jonah Hill at the helm visibly learning and improving from the work he’s done with his guidance, there’s slightly more weight to what’s on the table. In moments where Stutz goes through his useful tools for emerging from the depths of depression or anxiety, we see Hill explain how and why they were useful for him. At one point, while Stutz is explaining the concept of “The Shadow”, the dark moments of our past we try to bury but that stunt our mental growth, Hill brings out a cardboard cutout of himself at 14. That version of Hill, which he says is overweight with acne, was an albatross around his neck. He relays coming to terms with that shame and learning to love that version of himself with a lightness that proves the impact of Stutz’s teaching.

Hill retraces his own years-long therapy sessions over the course of Stutz, his mostly affable presence sometimes coarse with the trauma of his own mental health journey, like defensiveness over the way he’s been perceived over the course of his career showing up in micro-expressions. But there’s such a deep warmth that he feels for Stutz, so much so that he felt compelled to make a whole movie about him like a metaphorical shouting from the rooftops. He turns that gratitude into a stage for not only Stutz but the practice of therapy itself. A slow, months (or even years) long journey of unlearning and growing that’s at odds with a fast-paced algorithmic system of content built around people seeing as much tailored content as they can in as short a time as possible. Though turning to Netflix might not be the most appropriate way to wrangle with our mental health, Stutz at least offers something that social media platforms don’t – time.