David Harbour has taken a big step in his mental health journey.
“There has been a great resurgence in the idea that psychotherapy, along with responsible medication, is key to remission,” Harbour, 50, said in an undated interview with Future of Personal Health. “I have not had a manic flare-up since I started psychoanalysis with a good therapist. Medication alone is only half the battle. There is not a cure-all formula, there is only hard individual work. If you can’t afford therapy, find groups that don’t charge or don’t charge much. You will improve.”
Harbour, who recently completed his 10-year, five-season run as Jim Hopper on Netflix’s Stranger Things, said he has been working with a therapist for years.
“I have been in therapy since I got sober in 1999,” he continued. “When I quit drinking, it forced me to confront a lot of demons that rose to the surface. However, I still was able to work once a week with a [clinical social worker] who put me on a sliding scale.”
However, Harbour added that he just began a new type of therapy.
“Only recently have I started intense psychotherapy, and it has made a world of difference in my treatment,” he said.
Psychotherapy, or talk therapy, involves a “variety of treatment techniques that aim to help a person identify and change unhealthy emotions, thoughts and behaviors,” according to Cleveland Clinic. Psychotherapy often goes deeper than typical therapy would.
Harbour, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in his mid-20s, also opened up about his manic episodes.
“Thought becomes disordered and chaotic. Things that have no meaning became meaningful. Names, numbers, and colors acquire a twisted symbolism,” he explained. “There is a fundamental narcissism at the bottom of it all that makes me think I am the center of all things, for good or for ill. My manic episodes are, of course, a manifestation of my own particular psychopathy. They all share those traits, but each episode has been linked to certain fixations I had at the time.”
Harbour said he wanted to share the update on his mental health journey to raise awareness.
“I wanted folks to know that although I am living my dreams now, this is not the way it’s always been,” the Hellboy star concluded. “There might be a mother of a child recently diagnosed with a mental illness out there who worried that her child would be an outcast. I wanted to speak to her and to the millions that know and love folks who are suffering.”
Harbour, who made headlines in 2025 for his split from Lily Allen and a rumored feud with Stranger Things costar Millie Bobby Brown, previously opened up about living with bipolar disorder and how acting has helped his mental health.
“I think there’s always been a link between creative people and what society defines as mental illness,” he said on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2019. “I think that, you know, for me personally, one of the things that I’ve felt in my life has been that I’ve been somewhat of an outcast or I’ve been sort of too sensitive for a lot of people. I’ve been too much in a certain way. And so acting allowed me to channel all of this neurosis, this sensitivity, into a character.”
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