‘Blue’s Clues’ Host Steve Burns Struggled With ‘Severe Clinical Depression’ While Filming the Hit Nickelodeon Show: ‘There Was a Cost’

usmagazine.com:

On his own journey. When Steve Burns left Blue’s Clues in 2002, many of the beloved show’s young viewers wondered where he went — and now he’s telling his truth.“I didn’t know it yet, but I was the happiest depressed person in North America,” the former kids’ show host, 49, revealed in an interview with Variety published Wednesday, November 16. “I was struggling with severe clinical depression the whole time I was on that show.

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.”Burns became the host of the animated series in 1996, when he was 22 years old and working as a voice actor at the time.

His easy-going demeanor quickly won over the series’ young audience and earned him a Daytime Emmy nomination in 2001. When he left the show the following year, Burns explained on the show that he was going off to college and that his younger brother, Joe — portrayed by Donovan Patton — would take over.He continued: “My strategy had been: ‘Hey, you got a great thing going, so just fight it!’ Turns out, you don’t fight depression; you collect it.

After I left Blue’s Clues, there was a long period of healing. It wasn’t until the death of my father that I really started to take things seriously, and my life became so much more manageable.”The Pennsylvania native shared that before his father’s death in 2015 he cared for him while he battled cancer, and the experience changed his outlook on life.