In an interview with Entertainment Tonight which was aired on November 3, Wayne Brady revealed that he has been suffering from depression. He also talked about how his ex-wife, Mandie Takata, helped him get the treatment that he desperately needed. Brady cites Robin Williams’ suicide as the wake-up call that made him want to get better and ultimately shaped his decision to go public.
He said in the interview, “I think that when you keep these secrets, and something that you learn as you read more and go into treatments and get help is, that these secrets kill. Nobody wants to out themselves, so to speak. Or if they out themselves, it’s in a very Hollywood way. If someone says, ‘I’m clinically depressed,’ that sounds like someone’s making something up.”
Wayne Brady gets candid about battling depression: http://t.co/0Brw29bFeA pic.twitter.com/FxN9yXBS60
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Brady’s divorce from Takata, his second wife, pushed him further into depression. However, things got really bad during his 42nd birthday back in June.
“I was there by myself, in my bedroom and I had a complete breakdown,” he tells the show. “Just go ahead and imagine for yourself a brother in his underwear, in his room, crying, you got snot … that birthday was the beginning of, ‘OK, I have got to make a change.’”
Brady and Takata are now neighbors and they are helping each other raise their daughter Maile. Wayne talked about the relationship with Takata in the interview.
“We said we want to give Maile the closest experience to living in the same house. We have always lived in different homes. We just live super close now. The fact of the matter is I like her mom. She was with me when no one else in the world was with me, except my mom. There was loyalty, there was trust. She is my baby mama.”
Wayne Brady currently hosts the game show Let’s Make a Deal on CBS.