A lot of people say, �I don�t understand how depression can be so bad that someone
would actually take their life.� And people really do. We hear about it all the time.
They actually go through with it and you go, �Oh my gosh! They really did it!� I was
so haunted and in such pain that I decided that I was going to actually do that. When
you go from thinking about it to actually taking an action it becomes a different ballgame.
I obviously didn�t go through with it. What happened for me was I guess I simply panicked
in the middle of the event, I guess you would call it, and ran in and called a suicide hotline,
very scared and that�s what happened with that situation.
I was nineteen years old when I really experienced my first bout of very serious depression.
I was kind of an, I guess, a depressive nervous kid and it was really when I was nineteen,
my first year of college when I thought, �There�s something wrong here.� And that was really
my first experience with what I considered a pretty serious mental health issue at that
point. I sought treatment when I was about 20. I
decided at that point that I was going to go and see a psychiatrist and see if I could
kind of try to figure out what was going on. I started talking a little bit about it but
I really didn�t really open up because I was afraid of what was going on. I didn�t
want to talk about it. And so for me, in the very beginning talk therapy really wasn�t
-- it didn�t do the trick. It wasn�t really very helpful.
My diagnosis was Major Clinical Depression and I felt that it was probably a correct
diagnosis but the mystery of really how bad it became was something that I didn�t understand
right away. So the diagnosis was, while it was Clinical Depression and diagnosable as
that, I still didn�t understand how it had gotten so severe beyond just a simple diagnosis
and having depression. A lot of times you can put your finger on
it and say, �Oh I�m going through a depression because of that.� But when it goes on and
on like for example when you can�t describe what you�re going through. It�s like being
followed around by a ghost who�s toying with you or trying to hurt you, you know?
I had to make eye contact and I had to have a confrontation. By that I mean that I had
to look at it. You can avoid anything if you want in your life. It�s easy to move around
things but they�re not going to go away. And for me, I had to stop everything. I literally
was not in school. I wasn�t working or anything. And I had to look right at it and say, �If
I�m going to live and I�m going to live happily or at least a content person, I have
to look right at it.� And I had to make eye contact with it. And make eye contact
is a big theme for me in all of this. I had to look at it to deal with it.
I don�t know how many times I�ve heard this over my 20-year battle with depression:
�just snap out of it.� Snap out of it, you know? Can you imagine saying that to someone
in a diabetic coma, �Hey! Snap out of it! Hey!� People believe me if we could just
snap out of these things we would do that rather than live in misery. I don�t choose
depression. I don�t wake up in the morning and say, �I hope I feel like shit today.�
I got into comedy because friends had always told me that I was kind of funny but at first
I didn�t take it seriously because I thought, everybody�s friends think they�re funny,
you know? And they said no, you can really do something funny like stand up or something
so I started doing open mic comedy in the 90�s and started getting a little work and
it started picking up and eventually I quit my job and went on the road. I started finding
some things funny about mental health that somebody said, and that was purely just in
journaling about it. I hadn�t planned on doing anything in mental health at all with
comedy. I wanted to be very careful that I was not making fun of people individually
or making fun of anything about mental health situations. So there is a fine line between
what�s funny and what could be kind of mean spirited. And so it�s a trick fine line
and I had to start writing things that way to make sure that I didn�t do that. And
that I�m laughing not only at myself but the whole situation of, how did we become
these types of people? You know it is amazing thinking that this kind of work has given
me a purpose in life because it�s counterintuitive, really, doing that kind of speaking about
it but it�s given me a purpose in life and it used to rob me of life. So it�s really
an amazing polar opposite, something that used to really almost kill me and just drain
me and make it like, why is life like this? And it has now given me a purpose in life;
it is a testament to what humor can do and that�s a big testament to it. Now it�s
given me this reason to go on and not just survive but to thrive. It�s one thing to
survive but when you thrive and your work really makes you feel good and people go,
�This is really good, what you�re doing.� Then you can feel good about yourself. That�s
an amazing thing. That�s an amazing realization to come to and say, �This used to really
rob me and now, in a sense, it�s given me a life to live.�
The way I feel about my diagnosis today is I try to take it in stride. I try to realize
that I�ve tried lots of different things and it�s not completely gone. It is certainly
much better than it was maybe 10 or 15 years ago but depression just seems to be a part
of my physiology. It�s just in my blood cells. It�s just part of who I am and it�s
beyond. Everybody knows what it�s like to have a bad day and life is crummy and you
kind of feel down now and then but it�s not what it is at all. It�s really a different
extreme so the way I feel about it today is it�s just a part of who I am and I have
to take it in stride. Some days I go, �What are you doing here? I don�t want this.�
And I try to take it in stride and keep making eye contact with it and do the best I can
with it and hopefully make depression get a job by giving me material. You know I got
to make it work. So that�s what I trying to do.
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