OCD Is No Joke: How Howie Mandel Manages His Mental Health

Howie Mandel of America's Got Talent doesn't just have talent. He also has obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a mental illness that has colored and impacted every aspect of his life and career, and he's worked tirelessly to break the stigma associated with the condition.

When he first inadvertently revealed his OCD diagnosis publicly, he was devastated.

"It was kind of by accident. I was doing The Howard Stern Show, and I didn't want to touch the door. They thought it was kind of funny to try to force me to touch the door, and I thought we were in a commercial break," Mandel recalled to Parade. "I was in a desperate moment on the verge of a panic attack. I told him that I had been diagnosed with something called obsessive-compulsive disorder and that I was medicated for it, and if you don't just appease me at this moment, you're probably going to have to call 911. They opened the door, and they let me out, and then I realized, as I was going on the other side of the door, that this had been broadcast nationally."

That moment is part of what drove Mandel to work with NOCD to raise awareness of OCD and increase access to care for patients who need it.

Related: What Is OCD?

"There's a stigma involved with even mentioning you have an issue," Mandel said. "In an office, you can say your back hurts and everybody's got a chiropractor, or you have to have a root canal and everybody tells you about their dentist. But you can't, in the middle of the day, just say to somebody, 'I'm just having trouble coping right now, and I feel like crying,' or 'I can't do anything and I'd like to go home,' or 'I gotta go call my psychiatrist.'"

Mandel also recognized one major flaw with overall healthcare when it comes to seeking help for mental health concerns.

"It's odd that our mental health is not part of our regular health curriculum, like our dental health—even when there's something not wrong with our teeth, we'll go get X-rays, we go get a cleaning," he pointed out. "But it's not part of our regular curriculum to just talk to somebody or have a mental health checkup, and I think that if it was part of our health curriculum, most problems in today's world would probably be solved."

Find out how Howie Mandel copes with his OCD on sets and off, how it actually somewhat helped him to become one of the top comedians on the planet, and how there is much more to the illness than just being tidy.

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What do you do in tough mental health moments to help ground yourself?

Listen, I'm not a doctor, but I will tell you that the one thing that I could recommend to everybody is to make his many people aware of [your mental health struggle] as possible. Even though it was by accident, just talking about it was the first little life preserver thrown my way that made me feel the most comfortable with somebody walking up to me and going, "I heard you on Stern. I have OCD too."

Know that you're not alone. Know that there are coping skills out there, to know that there are tools like NOCD or even just yoga and breathing exercises, distractions and therapy. And talk to someone—it may be your parents, it may be coworkers you trust or even people you don't know. The one thing I will tell everybody is don't lock it inside, because that's debilitating, dangerous and really hard.

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You weren't actually diagnosed with OCD until relatively late in your life. How did that impact you as a child?

I don't have a GED. I was asked to leave many schools for behavioral problems. It turns out that when I finally got the diagnosis of OCD, these things that were coming up in my life are products of that issue. But I didn't know that, and I didn't know until my mid-40s.

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Part of going undiagnosed may be that a lot of people don't realize what OCD can look like.

I can tell you that there isn't a day that goes by [without] someone [approaching] me and [going], "I'm a little OCD. I'm like you! I like everything organized."

For those people, I really want to tell them that they probably don't have OCD. If you really know what OCD is, you know it is debilitating. Howard Hughes, at the end of his life, was lying naked in the fetal position and peeing into a bottle. I can't tell you how close I am to that at any given time in my life.

It's not about what people think it's about: just wanting things in order. It's more than that. It's rituals and thoughts. Think of a skipping record. What if your mind was a skipping record? What if you had a thought, and instead of moving on from that thought, it just went over and over and over and over again? And what if that thought was a scary thought? What if that thought was a dark thought? What if that thought was a ritual where you had to do something, you had to do something, and if you didn't do it—it was debilitating and painful and horrible? That's real OCD. It's not about lining things up.

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How has your work with NOCD helped you?

OCD is incredibly prevalent. Not only is it incredibly prevalent, but if you don't have it, you know somebody who does, you work with somebody who does. It's probably the most misdiagnosed problem that people have. It's debilitating.

I live in LA, I do really well. I have access to whatever help I need. I think the biggest problem with mental health is that people don't have access to or the funds to really get help. What NOCD has provided is care that's available to everybody. It's affordable, and anyplace, anytime, it's right there on your device. You know, how do I and the and they're experts in this field.

Also, mental health is very fickle. You know, you've got to keep testing—even with medication, you know, you take a medication, you feel good, your body chemistry changes. A couple of years later, you may have to change the dose or change the medication, find a new therapist. NOCD has access to all of this at your fingertips.

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How has your mental health impacted your comedy?

For me it's always been, because I've got a reputation preceding me as a comedian, being able to own it into my life. I say, "If I don't laugh, I'll cry." Anybody with a sense of humor looks for a dark place to have the sense to take that [and] find the funniest moment. That's why you see comedy and tragedy beside each other on those masks because they're very close.

I try to mask and also distract myself from my issues with comedy, with being funny. So that's one of my personal tools. Besides that, I go to therapy, and I'm medicated—but that's not for everybody.

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Is there a specific bit or part of your act that actually benefited from your OCD?

It's actually how I got into this business. This is not something I aspired to do. This is not something I plan to do. It was a dare in April 1977 at Yuk Yuks in Toronto. I went to see a live comedy show and the owner and the emcee said that amateurs can come up and do three minutes on Monday nights. Somebody said, "You should go up," and I say yes to everything.

I went up [onstage] and I wasn't thinking. I didn't prepare. And I didn't care! I just thought it was funny for somebody to go, "Ladies and gentlemen, Howie Mandel," and then I'd show up. And I did.

Then I realized in a moment of terror that I was standing there on stage with absolutely nothing prepared, with a bunch of strangers staring at me waiting for something, and I had nothing. And if you look at old YouTube videos of me, my act is just pure terror. It's like me going, "OK, OK, OK, wait, OK, all right. Let me just try to think of something." And I put my hands in my pockets, just because I was nervous. I happened to have rubber gloves because whenever I was out in public, I had rubber gloves because I figured if I go to a public restroom, I don't want to touch anything. I always carried rubber gloves.

Without any thought, I took them out of my pocket. I don't know why. I can't even fathom what was going through my mind. My mind was blank, and filled with terror. I pulled the rubber glove over my head and started breathing through the nose and the fingers were blowing up. And then it popped. I blew it up with my nose and popped the glove off my head.

If you look at old pictures, and my album cover, the rubber gloves had become my staple. It bought me my first house. I was known as the guy with the rubber glove on his head. So if I didn't have, you know, my issues, I probably wouldn't have had rubber gloves.

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Have you ever had to explain to anyone on sets why you needed things to be done a certain way?

This is a real issue. Even if it's putting a cup down, you know, where has that come in? Can you give me a straw? When was it washed? And I ask more questions. Now my reputation precedes me. But up until it did, people didn't understand and just thought I was incredibly fastidious, neurotic and weird, which was okay when I entered show business, but I didn't enter show business till my mid-20s.

So up until then, it was really hard for me publicly, and I didn't have a lot of friends. I was like a pariah. Being different as a young person is not seen as an asset. I embrace that now. But you know, we all that's what pop culture is, pop culture is whatever's popular. If you could be like somebody else, if you could dress like somebody else, if you can act like somebody else, then you fit in. When you're not like anybody else, you stand out, and that's really hard as a young person. And that was always my problem.

There is a dichotomy between what I suffer from and what I've chosen as a vocation. A set is a very public space, and just by virtue of what I do, there are makeup artists there to put powder on my face and adjust what I'm wearing, and I have trouble shaking hands. I have people touching me, and I have people backstage that want to do a meet and greet. I live in a world of space invaders, and that's their job and that's my fear. My job, their job, and my fears don't really go together in the best way, so I have to figure out how to cope with each and every waking moment of my life and my work.

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COVID-19 led a lot of people to pivot, especially comedians. How do you like being a podcast host?

That was also a coping skill. You know, during COVID-19, everybody's gone through a tough time, and for me, because I had this already existing issue, I'm living in a worldwide pandemic in my own mind constantly. And then there actually is one in 2020.

My oldest daughter has OCD and anxiety, probably genetic, and she was locked in and I was locked in, and they didn't want to come near me because I'm older and that was supposed to be the most vulnerable age [for COVID-19 patients]. I needed to distract myself because I wasn't busy and it was really hard mentally, so I'd sit for hours on the phone with my daughter just to have a connection, just to talk about something else, just to do something goofy, just a prank call a friend. She would connect somebody in and then I'd sometimes connect my celebrity friends.

My wife walked into the room at one point and said, "Well, what are you doing?" I said, "I'm on the phone with Jackie and we're FaceTiming with all these people." My wife asked what it was for and I told her, "It's for us." She said we should record it, and that became our podcast, Howie Mandel Does Stuff. One of the brightest spots in my week is sitting down with my daughter and friends and just having this podcast.

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