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Jessica Holmes, New Talk: Depression, The Comedy

Jessica Holmes, a favourite on CBC TV’s Royal Canadian Air Farce, has brought the house down opening for giants such as Ellen DeGeneres, Leslie Nielsen, Jerry Seinfeld, and Oprah Winfrey. Her comedic high-jinks and crazy antics, topped with her unique knack for skewering celebrities (including Celine Dion and Britney Spears), are sure to amuse even the most straight-faced audiences. What some people may not know about Jessica, however, is that in addition to being one of Canada’s funniest and most successful comedians, she’s also one of the many Canadians who has suffered from depression. In her frank new talk, “Depression: The Comedy”, Jessica lays bare her personal struggle with the condition using honest stories and of course, the humor she is known for, all in the attempt to shed light on this common affliction and to help end the stigma once and for all. Watch Jessica speak about her depression in the clip below:

Depression: The Comedy

This is a frank and hilarious account of how it took Jessica Holmes two years to get diagnosed as depressed. Since depression is a mental illness, not a physical one like chicken pox or a missing limb, it’s difficult to quantify. Jessica’s was a very gradual descent from a 9/10 in life satisfaction to an emotional dumpster.

It started small: she resented fun stuff like girls night out, developed a loathing for words like “wellness,” and avoided foods that promised to prolong her life. Even yawning through an emceeing job for Oprah Winfrey didn’t sound any alarms for her.

By the end of 2013, she slept more than the cat, gave her husband a hall pass, and told her TV agent “hold my calls for six months” before she acknowledged my problem. ‎

In the nearly two years that she had transitioned from “cheerleader” to “zombie”, she hadn’t taken stock of how far she had veered from her ideal life of fulfillment and gratitude.

Jessica’s story, which has a deeply happy ending, relates to anyone who has ever been on a downhill trajectory, whether with health, relationships, or career, who forgot to stop and ask “where am I?”