Sarah Silverman & Lena Dunham Share How Therapy Helped Them Thrive

In a new video series from filmmakers Alex Karpovsky and Teddy Blanks — collectively known as Spielbergs — celebrities distill decades of experience in therapy down to two minute videos, BuzzFeed reports.

The first season of the series, called Shrink, debuted today to coincide with National Psychotherapy Day and includes interviews with comediennes Sarah Silverman and Lena Dunham. Although each woman had vastly different experiences in therapy and reasons to be there — Silverman for depression and Dunham to manage obsessive compulsive disorder — they both talk about how going to therapy as children helped them thrive later in life.

"You know when people go like, 'Wow, how do you do stand-up, that would be so scary to me,'" Silverman says. "And I'm like, 'That is nothing compared to my childhood. What are you risking? Bombing? Who cares.' So, in a way, it subsequently made me very brave."

Just like Silverman, Dunham also started therapy as a child. Some of her struggles as someone with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder were centered around how other people thought of her, and therapy helped her realize that. "My therapist is the first person who really pointed out to me how much of my life I was living in service of other people's perceptions of me,'" she said.

In having these conversations with well-known and successful artists like Silverman and Dunham about how going to therapy helped them manage negative emotions or mental illness, Shrink aims to destigmatize therapy and help others who may be struggling make the decision to find a therapist.

The videos also show how therapy can be helpful for many different reasons. Therapists helped Silverman and Dunham manage mental health, but talking to a therapist also helped New Yorker writer Susan Orlean open up about problems in her marriage and it gave author Gary Shteyngart the courage to publish his first book.

Watching these videos, it's clear that therapy can be helpful to anyone and that there's nothing wrong with needing to talk things out.

Watch season one of Shrink on Vimeo.