Howie Mandel didn’t decide to go public about his mental health. He was thinking about a doorknob.
On the newest episode of Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb, the America’s Got Talent judge walks through the single worst hour of his life — an hour that started with a filthy door handle and ended with a stranger in Manhattan traffic.
Mandel had recently been diagnosed with OCD, anxiety and ADHD in his forties, after a lifetime of assuming that what happened in his head was simply what happened in everyone’s head. Almost nobody knew. “My wife and my family knew,” he tells Kotb. “Didn’t mention anybody.”
Then he went on the Howard Stern Show. And while Stern talked, Mandel says he heard almost none of it, because people he didn’t consider sanitary had already gone out through the studio door.
“My whole direction was, am I going to get out that door? How do I handle that door?” he says. He compares Stern’s voice to the muffled adult trombone in a Charlie Brown cartoon.
So he told the truth on a live microphone.
“Howard, honestly, can I be honest with you for a second… I just went to a psychiatrist. I’ve been diagnosed with something called OCD and I have an anxiety. And if you don’t open the door for me right now, you’re going to have to call 911, because I’m about to pass out.”
Stern opened the door. Here’s the part Mandel didn’t know: he thought they’d gone to commercial.
Standing in the hallway, he heard the speakers. The show was still going — and they were discussing what had just happened.
“Oh my god, I just broadcast that I have a mental health issue,” he remembers thinking.
He was convinced his kids would be ridiculed at school. He was convinced his career was finished, because every production sends performers to a doctor for an insurance clearance, and no one insures millions of dollars against a man who just announced he’s mentally ill on the radio.
He got in the elevator, walked out into a teeming Manhattan street, and could not breathe. He says it was the darkest, most frightening point of his life. A man appeared at the edge of his vision and asked if he was Howie Mandel. Mandel, unable to make eye contact, said yes. The man asked if he’d just been on Howard. This is it, Mandel thought. This is it.
The man said two words: “Me too.”
“I have OCD, and it’s so refreshing to hear somebody talk about it,” the stranger told him. Mandel says he had never in his life been in a room with another person who admitted to having it — not once, outside his psychiatrist’s office.
Then he went home to wait for the disaster. It never came. Within three days, a couple of letters arrived. The next week, fifty. Then the mail didn’t stop — people writing about their own minds, to the guy who’d accidentally gone first.
“And then I realized, oh my god, I’m not alone.”
Hear Howie Mandel’s full conversation withHoda Kotb on Joy 101— on the free iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
