Mental Health: an innovative treatment

I went to the Vancouver Public Salon this week.  It’s a collection of speakers giving short talks on a wide variety of interesting topics.  Their moto is: “Interesting People. Interesting Ideas. An evening to inspire and educate.”

Check out what one of the speakers, David Granirer is doing:  Stand Up for Mental Health, is a health project that teaches people with mental illness how to do stand up comedy.   An unlikely approach and I admit, not the first therapy that would have come to my mind.  But it’s a wildly popular class with training now all around Canada and the US, including Vancouver, Victoria, Courtenay, Chilliwack, Abbotsford, Fort Frances, Guelph, Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal and Halifax.

“There’s something amazing about having members your community take the stage at an event and rock the house, says Granirer. It’s incredibly empowering and a great way of fighting public stigma. Most so-called normal people would never want to go anywhere near stand-up comedy. Seeing people with mental illness do it forces the audience to re-evaluate their perceptions of and prejudices against people who have a mental illness.”

“I’ve had students overcome long standing depressions and phobias, not to mention increasing their confidence and self-esteem. There’s something incredibly healing about telling a roomful of people exactly who you are and having them laugh and cheer.”

“Seeing people talking about their mental illness through comedy would have made such a difference to me [at the point in my life when I was suffering from depression]. To have mental illness brought out of the closet in that way, to have role models who were funny and courageous would have been huge in helping me to overcome my shame.  I remember going around thinking, ‘I am nothing, I am no one.’ My whole personality changed from being an extrovert to a hermit who isolated and avoided people. I’d be walking down the street and see someone I knew and run around the block to hide from them.”

Says David, “I got tired of all those self-help books that say you have to be completely confident and spiritually centered in order to succeed. I think those books set people up to fail. I’m basically a neurotic guy, and my fear and anxiety are a fabulous source of motivation. And I think there are lots of people out there like that. We need to be able to celebrate our neurotic ways of getting things done rather than feel ashamed.”

Here is the local calendar if you’re interested in catching a show or want to learn more about the program.