Few people in the world can feel the apotheosis of a solo musical artist who sings live in front of a crowded stadium. Tens of thousands of people clap their hands, chant lyrics, dance and hang on your lips. What is it like to be that person? How much mental strength does it take to deal with this?

In the Netflix documentary “Louis Capaldi: how I feel now” we see a man on the verge of mental and physical decline, with convulsions starting in the shoulder and shaking the whole body, and a look that reveals inner pain and unspeakable anxiety. This is the same young man who, in 2019, saw his first single “Someone You Loved” rise to number one in the UK and US charts, and his follow-up album “Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent” became the best-selling album of the last five years in United Kingdom. And his concerts in March 2020 alone, with over 250,000 people in attendance, sold out (literally) in seconds.

“Too often I feel like an impostor, I have impostor syndrome. I can’t believe I deserved all this,” Capaldi admits on camera. A year after his huge success, he pulled out of the last big show of the season at Wembley. Panic attacks and convulsions were now so common that they could not be linked. After medical examinations, it turned out that the Scottish musician suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, the consequences of which sharply worsened due to his constant stress. After three difficult years, he now feels better, because in September we will see him live for the first time in our country.

“Too many times I felt like a fraud. I can’t believe I deserved all this,” Capaldi admits on camera.

Around the same time as Capaldi’s documentary, a four-episode series called “Ed Sheeran: The Sum of Everything”. Arguably the biggest male pop star of the last decade, he describes his career path from when he was a mic-grabbing toddler at every opportunity to stardom, tens of millions of records, and the highest-grossing tour in music history. An otherwise happy Ed Sheeran, however, saw his childhood friend Jamal Edwards die of a drug overdose in 2022, his wife contracted cancer while she was pregnant with her second child, and two plagiarism lawsuits against him that he won. .

Various tasks were faced Billie Eilish, another young musician whose popularity has skyrocketed in recent years. In an excellent documentary “Billie Eilish: The world is a little blurry” on Apple TV, we follow Billy as he tries to overcome his depression and come to terms with his body. We also see how the (then) 18-year-old was forced to struggle with the influence of a celebrity who wouldn’t let her do almost anything that is taken for granted by teenagers her age.

The above are examples of new star artists who have found themselves on the dark side of a celebrity from time to time and are (mostly) very comfortable talking about it. Mental health, a taboo topic in entertainment and sports for decades because we want specific characters to be perfect, has come to the surface more and more in recent years. Improviser comedian Bo Burnham speaks at one point in the masterpiece “Inside” (Netflix): “For a long time, I went crazy thinking I could never finish this episode and would work on it forever. And recently it seemed to me that I was close to doing it. Maybe I’ll finish it eventually. And that scared me even more, because if I’m done, that means I’ll stop working on it and just live my life, so I’m not going to, I’m not going to end it. I will write this forever and never publish it. So I’m not talking to anyone right now, I’m just talking to myself. Well, yes, and what happened?