Howie Mandel, the 70-year-old comedian and "America's Got Talent" host, says his lifelong battle with OCD and germaphobia drove him to self-medicate with gummies, smoking, and alcohol during the COVID-19 pandemic, a spiral he says nearly cost him his life.
Mandel made the disclosure on Hoda Kotb's "Joy 101" podcast, describing in plain terms how the collision of a real-world pandemic with his pre-existing mental health conditions left him unable to sleep and desperate for any way to shut his mind off. The comedian, who has spoken publicly about his OCD and ADHD for years, said the pandemic turned his long-running anxieties from a punchline into a crisis.
His wife Terry, he said, found him unresponsive on multiple occasions and considered rushing him to the hospital. She ultimately gave him an ultimatum that may have saved his life.
Mandel has never hidden his germaphobia. In March 2020, as COVID-19 began spreading across the country, he showed up on the "America's Got Talent" set in a full hazmat suit, gas mask, and orange rubber gloves. At the time, it read as a gag. Behind the scenes, things were far less funny.
As Page Six reported, Mandel told Kotb that his rumination, the relentless mental loop familiar to OCD sufferers, made sleep impossible once a genuine global health emergency validated his worst fears.
"But during the pandemic, I couldn't sleep because part of my rumination is... I make fun of it, but I'm a germaphobe and I live like I'm in a pandemic anyhow. And then where there [was] a real one, it was hard for me to handle that."
He did not sugarcoat the progression. Gummies came first. Then smoking. Then drinking. All of it aimed at a single goal.
"It was hard for a lot of people, but I wasn't strong enough to handle it, and I couldn't sleep, so I started taking gummies."
Mandel did not specify whether the gummies were cannabis edibles or another product. What he did make clear was the result: he was trying to knock himself unconscious, and it worked, too well.
The most alarming detail was the simplest. Mandel said there were times his wife Terry, married to him since 1980, physically could not rouse him.
"There were times when my wife, she couldn't wake me up, or she thought she was going to take me to the hospital."
He called it what it was.
"It wasn't healthy and it wasn't good, and it's not an excuse, but it was really bad."
Mandel said flatly that he "almost died" during this period. He credited Terry with forcing the turning point, recalling her words in blunt terms.
"My wife just went, 'I can't do this. This is really tiring. Go talk to somebody.'"
He called her a hero. And he listened.
Mandel told Kotb he is now sober, on prescription medication, and working with a therapist. He drew a careful line between the self-medication that nearly ended his life and the professional treatment he now follows.
"So I've medicated myself. And I'm talking about prescription medication, not that I'm self-medicating, though I did that during [the COVID-19 pandemic] and I almost died."
The comedian framed his ongoing mental health management as a daily balancing act. He described a constant effort to stay above the emotional lows that his OCD and ADHD produce.
"I have such a fear of those lows because they're incredibly painful and hard to navigate."
"My life consists of trying to balance up here."
None of this is entirely new ground for Mandel. In a May 2020 interview with Page Six, recorded while the pandemic was still in its early months, he acknowledged he was already on medication and leaning hard on his therapist. He joked at the time that he was "moving my therapist into a whole new tax bracket on the phone" and quipped, "Some people call it a pandemic. I call it 'told ya!'"
But the podcast appearance went further than anything he had said publicly before, laying out the full scope of how close the situation came to a fatal outcome.
Mandel's account is his own, and he did not generalize it into a policy argument. But the facts he described, isolation, sleeplessness, escalating substance use, a spouse watching helplessly, will sound familiar to millions of Americans who lived through the same period under varying degrees of government-imposed restriction. The pandemic's mental health toll is still being measured, and stories like Mandel's put a specific face on the damage.
He did not blame anyone else. He said plainly that he "wasn't strong enough to handle it." That kind of honesty from a public figure is worth more than the usual celebrity wellness branding.
When the people who locked the country down talk about what they got right, they rarely mention the Howie Mandels, the ones who nearly didn't make it through.
