Authentic “Blue’s Clues” host Steve Burns says long-running web rumors about him dying severely deepened his battle with despair.
The previous Nickelodeon character opened up about his psychological well being whereas showing on Rainn Wilson’s “Soul Boom” podcast on Thursday, the place he instructed “The Office” alum that the “urban legend” finally tricked him into considering he could be higher off lifeless.
“I was in kind of the throes of this depression after I left the show,” he defined. “But what a lot of people don’t understand is that, that during the show, the internet was beginning to internet, and the world decided, or a large portion of the world decided, that I had died.”
Whereas the bogus tales behind his alleged dying ran the gamut, baseless claims that he had died of an overdose or by suicide made the already-struggling Burns really feel much more hopeless.
The suicide rumors have been “not what you want to hear when you’re severely clinically depressed,” he stated. “But when a gazillion people you’ve never met tell you that you’re dead, it’s bad when you’re severely clinically depressed. And there was nothing I could do about this rumor. I mean, Nickelodeon didn’t like it, either.”
Although the community tried to assist him debunk the rumors with large media appearances, Burns found the fiction was a lot more durable to undo than he believed.
Nickelodeon Community/Courtesy Everett Assortment
And the longer the lie lingered, the extra it harm the star, who instructed Wilson, “When a rumor like that persists for three or four years, it stops being funny. When it persists for 10 years, it feels like a cultural preference … When it persists for 15 or 20 years, you start to feel like you’re supposed to be [dead].”
So after repeatedly listening to he was lifeless for years after leaving “Blue’s Clues” in 2001, the star stated he fell right into a “gray” interval of life, the place he did little greater than drink and isolate himself.
“Everyone thought I was dead, and eventually, I started playing along,” he defined.
Burns was solely in a position to dig himself out of his despair as soon as he hit a low level in life whereas caring for his dying father and realizing, “I don’t like how I feel, all the time, and I can’t do this.”
Mathew Tsang through Getty Photographs
Curiously, the character that introduced him a lot angst ended up guiding him out of the darkness.
“Steve became my teacher,” he stated. “Every day, on ‘Blue’s Clues,’ I would sit on a chair and look at someone in the eye and ask, ‘Will you help me?’ It wasn’t until I did that in my life, in my real life, that things changed.”
Elsewhere in the course of the interview, Burns defined the unattainable bind kids’s tv hosts face: They are often seen as an “implausible saint” or a secret trainwreck, with nothing in between, he stated.
“You get bifurcated and marginalized to the extremes,” he stated, as he admitted he nervous he would finally “disappoint everyone” after they found he was a “normal” particular person with each presents and flaws.
“It was difficult to be the happiest man in North America when I did not feel that way,” the actor stated.
Burns beforehand make clear his exit from “Blue’s Clues” in a 2022 interview with Selection when he stated, “It was my job to be utterly and completely full of joy and wonder at all times, and that became impossible.”
“I was always able to dig and find something that felt authentic to me that was good enough to be on the show, but after years and years of going to the well without replenishing it, there was a cost.”
Should you or somebody you already know wants assist, name or textual content 988 or chat 988lifeline.org for psychological well being assist. Moreover, yow will discover native psychological well being and disaster assets at dontcallthepolice.com. Outdoors of the U.S., please go to the Worldwide Affiliation for Suicide Prevention.
