Happy Mental Health Month, readers!

To honor Mental Health Month, we’re doing a weekly challenge over at Your Body, Your Mind throughout the month.

This week’s challenge is to incorporate laughter into our daily lives.

The physical, mental, and emotional health benefits of laughter are plentiful. Laughter can boost endorphins, help you manage stress, help you get a better night’s sleep,

As people who read up on celebrity news or keep up with entertainment media, you’re probably well aware of the humor waiting around every corner!

So, why not take a page from the Your Body, Your Mind readers’ challenge and try to incorporate more laughter in your week?

Keira Knightley may soon find her Safe Haven (oh my, how bad was that?), but the actress best known for her roles in hits like Pirates of the Caribbean, Atonement, and Pride & Prejudice apparently doesn’t feel as safe as some of us might expect.

Well, regarding her appearance, that is.

Although Knightley has appeared on lists like FHM‘s “100 Sexiest Women In The World” and Maxim‘s “Hot 100,” the actress tells Vogue that she doesn’t see herself as glamorous or even attractive.

Actually, she’s self-conscious about her body image and blames her career for her anxiety:

Do I really have to give a reason why you should spend your weekend listening to Dave Matthews Band?

Really?

Well, if you insist.

Dave Matthews spent last Sunday helping raise money at the ninth annual John Varvato’s Stuart House Benefit.

The Stuart House is a facility for child victims of sexual assault established by the Santa Montica-UCLA Medical Center’s Rape Treatment Center.

According to the Stuart House page on www.911rape.org, the Stuart House:

[...] remedies many of the problems in the traditional system that often revictimize these profoundly traumatized children, such as multiple, repetitive interviews in cold, institutional settings; low prosecution rates; and critical shortages in expert medical care and therapy services.

Speaking of Oprah…

She and Lady Gaga kicked off Gaga’s new “youth empowerment” foundation, the Born This Way Foundation, at Harvard University just a couple of weeks ago.

Although Lady Gaga has been active in the anti-bullying movement, the Born This Way Foundation is not an anti-bully organization; rather, Gaga says the Foundation is a “youth-empowerment foundation.”

The Born This Way Foundation lists three pillars – safety, skills, and opportunity – and aims to “foster a more accepting society, where differences are embraced and individuality is celebrated”:

The Foundation is dedicated to creating a safe community that helps connect young people with the skills and opportunities they need to build a braver, kinder world.

We believe that everyone has the right to feel safe, to be empowered and to make a difference in the world. Together, we will move towards acceptance, bravery and love.

Whoa, talk about big weekend for Daniel Radcliffe and fans.

First, Radcliffe’s new film, The Lady In Black, debuted to overall rave reviews this weekend.

I couldn’t get on Twitter or Facebook without seeing a post about how great it was, and although the majority of print reviews claim the film adaptation of the 1983 thriller fiction novel of the same name uses some tried-and-true techniques for scaring us silly, Los Angeles Times calls it “a good, old-fashioned ghost yarn of the Victorian Gothic persuasion,” The Hollywood Reporter says it’s a “nifty old-school horror film,” and NPR reminds us there’s a reason these techniques are “time-honored”:

[...] keep you on edge, they definitely do.

Oh, and The Boston Globe says Radcliffe is now “in for the long haul.”

Then, Radcliffe admits that he used to show up on the Harry Potter set drunk.

If you have some free time this weekend and your local theater is showing it, you might want to check out My Week With Marilyn, the new Marilyn Monroe film starring Eddie Redmayne, Kenneth Branagh, Emma Watson, and Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe.

My Week With Marilyn is a 99-minute British flick (don’t worry – it’s hit a number of theaters in The States) based on British writer and filmmaker Colin Clark’s account of working with Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier during The Prince and the Showgirl – an account made up of two books and turned into a screenplay by writer Adrian Hodges.

The film played at nearly every fest you can think of (the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, and the Chicago International Film Festival, just to name a few), but it doesn’t seem to be getting rave reviews now that it’s been released to the general British and American publics.

Last week, USA WEEKEND posted an interview with actress Mariel Hemingway about her 2009 award-winning film, Archie’s Final Project.

The film, which will be released to DVD next month (December 6, 2011), is about a topic that has seemingly surrounded Mariel all her life: Suicide.

Many of you probably know the 50-year-old actress is the granddaughter of American author, journalist, and Nobel Prize-winner Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, For Whom The Bell Tolls, The Old Man And The Sea), who committed suicide in 1961.

Because of this connection, some of you might even know Mariel has been a suicide prevention advocate for many years.

Yet, I’m willing to bet a smaller portion of you know that Mariel’s association with suicide – and mental health in general – goes much deeper than her famous grandfather.

From horror movies like Halloween to haunted houses roamed by stray mental health patients, when it comes to scare tactics, mental illness has long shared the spotlight with goblins, ghouls, and other Things That Go Bump In The Night – and not just during Halloween.

Some advocates turn the other cheek when it comes to using mental illness as a scare tactic; they’ve learned to pick their battles, if you will. Others actively fight against the stigma they believe such representations promote.

Others still snub knee-jerk reactions in either direction and instead use the depictions as teaching tools.

Fortunately, I’m not writing yet another post about why you should or should not be okay with movies called Psycho or parents allowing their children to trick-or-treat donning the iconic Jason Voorhees hockey mask.

(Pause for applause.)

I am, however, going to tell you that contrary to what many mental health advocates preach, there are scary things – truly scary things – about mental illness.

Okay, okay, okay – she might not have gotten naked for his charity (or even lent her name to it), but Jennifer Aniston is helping Ben Stiller in another big way -

- and not just by partying with him after his recent Saturday Night Live hosting gig.

At a charity auction at New York City’s Christie’s auction house, the 42-year-old actress who’s getting ready to show the world her directing skills with Five dropped a cool $450,000 on “Stranger #44,” an original piece of art by American artist Glenn Ligon.

The auction, dubbed “Artists for Haiti,” was held to raise money for health and education in Haiti. Ben Stiller co-founded the event, and in all “Artists for Haiti” brought in $13.7 million.

Learn more about “Artists for Haiti,” or head over to The Stiller Foundation to find out how Ben’s working toward providing opprotunities for children across the globe.

Image Source: Wikipedia

Despite how you feel about Mel Gibson, you might want to grab a copy of the The Beaver this weekend, according to fellow PsychCentral.com blogger Joseph Burgo, Ph.D., who has posted a review of the film over at Movies & Mental Health.

The Beaver (directed by Jodi Foster, who also co-stars as Gibson’s wife) tells the story of a depressed and suicidal man who begins communicating with a hand puppet (a beaver) in an effort to relieve his depression symptoms.

Burgo’s review of the film claims it tackles the difficult subject of suicidal depression “with psychological insight and emotional honesty.”