What does content creation do to mental health?

By Alex HoganJuly 6, 2026

Senior Multimedia Producer

I was recently in Anaheim, Calif., for Vidcon, the biggest social video creator conference of the year. I create YouTube and Instagram videos for STAT, so I’ve been to Vidcon a few times as an attendee. But this year I was struck by how much of the conference’s programming was dedicated to the mental health of content creators.

I’ve covered the mental health implications of social video consumption in a previous STATus Report. But I was interested to hear more about the mental health of the people who put themselves out there on social media, often with audiences numbering in the millions.

In this week’s STATus Report, I speak with Andy Neal, an Instagram creator whose life was transformed overnight when a video he posted suddenly garnered tens of millions of views. I also chatted with Shira Laraz, a content creator and the founder of Creators 4 Mental Health, an organization that advocates for better mental health protections for content creators.