It's tempting to think that he's wealthy and working and so this disclosure is easy to make, because it won't affect his work life.
In theory we have anti-discrimination laws here, but it's hard to prove that someone hasn't employed you because of your mental health problems. And actors usually need to be insured when they're doing a film. It's hard for some actors to get that insurance, expensive, because of past mental illness.
Stephen Fry (among others in some UK media) is doing good work at destigmatizing mental illness.
I'm not wealthy or well-connected, but I'm "coming out" about mental illness myself. I've talked about it at length on HN (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2043019), but I'm working on a blog post now that talks about this in detail, with the goal of actually opening a dialogue about mental illness in the tech industry. You can read what I have so far here: https://gist.github.com/daeken/8bc79e53311d2e32a981 It still needs a lot of work, and my mother (a mental health practitioner by trade) wrote a section with extensive resources that I haven't yet integrated, but it's coming along.
I've been getting better lately, but for a few months I was the worst I've ever been in my life; not being able to talk publicly about it for fear of discrimination and the general mental health stigma makes the loneliness... crushing. I'm hoping this will help others take the first step to helping themselves and others.
This particular disclosure is new, but he's been open about being bi-polar for a while, and IIRC about at least one past suicide attempt (see the documentary mentioned elsewhere).
In theory we have anti-discrimination laws here, but it's hard to prove that someone hasn't employed you because of your mental health problems. And actors usually need to be insured when they're doing a film. It's hard for some actors to get that insurance, expensive, because of past mental illness.
Stephen Fry (among others in some UK media) is doing good work at destigmatizing mental illness.