Beth Wants the D, an autobiographical comedy by performer Beth May about the challenges of living with bipolar disorder, has won the 2025 Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Beth May’s Edinburgh Fringe debut, first performed in Los Angeles in 2023, was one of five shows on the 2025 award shortlist, which this year includes work from the USA and Hong Kong as well as across the UK.
The Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award was established in 2017 in recognition of the most compelling new work about mental health at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The award is currently sponsored by the Cornwell Charitable Trust and offers a cash prize of £3,000 plus additional support tailored to each winning artist.
Beth Wants the D, at the Pleasance Courtyard, is described as ‘a comedy about all the times Beth May has thought about killing herself’ and is a searingly honest (but also very funny) account of learning to live with a long term mental illness.
Fringe Award Shortlist
The five shows shortlisted for this year’s Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award were:
The City for Incurable Women (Pleasance Courtyard)
A centuries-spanning account of medical misogyny and the origins of the term ‘hysteria’ by theatre collective fish in a dress, focusing on the bizarre tale of the psychiatric hospital in 1880s Paris where female patients were photographed demonstrating their symptoms to the public in order to prove theories about the ‘four stages of madness’.
Beth Wants the D (Pleasance Courtyard)
A candid autobiographical comedy about living with bipolar disorder by Beth May. Written and performed by Beth May in collaboration with Riley Rose Critchlow (director), Mahayla Laurence (stage manager), Olivia Cade (associate producer) and Alison Zatta (producer).
Dots (theSpace)
Annie Cheung’s powerful and very personal solo show about ‘the psychology of insecure overachievers’ vividly explores how her high functioning depression is rooted in formative experiences from her childhood in Hong Kong.
Joe Tracini: Ten Things I Hate About Me (Underbelly)
Comedian Joe Tracini lives with Borderline Personality Disorder, and in a hugely entertaining TED talk style show he runs through each of his symptoms in turn, explaining the impact they have had on his life – via some very funny anecdotes about going viral during lockdown, compulsive lying, and ‘a gang lord forcing me to hold a raw chicken’ (including photographic evidence).
Troubled (Summerhall)
Suzy Crothers grew up in Belfast during the Troubles, when bombings, rioting and a heavy police presence were an everyday part of existence. Her solo show, described as ‘a tale of love, death and division’ is a powerful portrayal of how the normalisation of violent events during childhood can impact on adult relationships, as Suzy’s efforts to commit to a romantic relationship are marred by traumatic flashbacks.
About the Fringe Award
The shortlist for the Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award is selected in consultation with arts and mental health professionals and the Scotsman newspaper’s team of experienced critics. Each year’s winner is announced at the Scotsman Fringe First Awards. Since 2023 the award has been sponsored by the Cornwell Charitable Trust and dedicated to the memory of arts journalist Tim Cornwell, who died in 2022.
Each year’s winner is offered a £3,000 prize plus a flexible package of support tailored to the needs of the show’s creative team and their future development, which may include mentoring support and mental health training, support with funding applications and/or a contribution to production costs.
The award is presented by the Mental Health Foundation in partnership with the Scotsman newspaper, for whom Tim Cornwell worked for many years as its arts correspondent. More recently Tim was part of the judging panel for the award, a subject close to his heart as someone living with Bipolar disorder. Tim died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism in June 2022.
Tim was a terrific and often underrated writer, on almost any subject you could think of; he was also very open about his mental health struggles. He was a valued member of the judging panel for the Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award, a task to which he brought both his personal insights and his many years of experience as an arts journalist. We are very grateful to the Cornwell Charitable Trust for offering to support this award; it feels like a fitting tribute, celebrating both Tim’s long relationship with the Edinburgh Fringe and his achievements in reducing the stigma around mental health.
Andrew Eaton-Lewis, Arts Programme Officer, Mental Health Foundation
Mental health has become an increasingly prominent theme at the Edinburgh Fringe over the past few years, with more and more artists making brave, honest and boundary-pushing work on the subject. The Mental Health Foundation set up its annual award in order to recognise, support and encourage new creative work that challenges mental health stigma, asks difficult questions, and opens up conversations.
The Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award is part of the Foundation’s year-round arts programme, which also includes the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival, one of the world’s biggest mental health themed arts festivals, which returns this year from 20 October to 9 November.
Fringe Award winner BATSHIT returns to Scotland
Winner of last year’s Mental Health Foundation Fringe Award, one-woman tour de force BATSHIT returns to Scotland this October as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival programme.
BATSHIT is a wildly theatrical, darkly comic, and deeply intimate reckoning with the myths and misconceptions of female madness. Created by psycho-siren Leah Shelton and directed by Olivier award-winning Ursula Martinez, BATSHIT is a requiem for Leah’s grandmother Gwen, who was incarcerated for seeking independence in 1960s Australia.
BATSHIT draws on personal stories, in-depth research and pop culture to unpack how psychiatry has been shaped by gender bias.
BATSHIT tours to The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen (17 Oct) and Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh (22-25 Oct).
