Somewhere in the middle of fourteen years he now calls his lost years, Dave Mowry could not walk to his own mailbox during daylight. If he went, he went at night, because a neighbor might look at him and see what was in his eyes. A knock at the door sent him into an anxiety attack. So did a ringing phone. When a song came on the radio that reminded him of the business he used to own, the memory of losing it would arrive whole, three or four times a day, and take him back down. He was not pretending to be someone else during those years. He was only pretending to be okay, and he says that pretending was the most exhausting part.
Mowry is a comedian, author, and former executive director of a NAMI affiliate in Oregon who lives with bipolar disorder and severe anxiety. Before his diagnosis, he was a successful businessman with a house, a family, and the feeling that he had arrived. Less than a year after that feeling, driving between two of his businesses, his mind broke in a way he describes as an audible snap. His family lost the businesses, lost the house, and spent eighteen months homeless. What eventually pulled him out was not what anyone would predict. It was a stand-up comedy class for people living with mental illness, taught in his community by comedian David Granirer. Mowry now teaches those classes himself and is the author of the bestselling OMG That’s Me! and Healing with Humor, which follows six people, including him, through that process.
Isolation Is the Symptom That Convinces You It Is Permanent
The first thing that shifted for Mowry had nothing to do with comedy. His wife saw a small newspaper ad for a local NAMI meeting and urged him to go. He drove there and sat in the parking lot for twenty minutes gathering himself before he could walk into the church basement. People said hello. Nobody asked him why he was there. He sat in a chair in the back, listened to a stranger tell a story, and recognized his own life inside it.
He said nothing to anyone and went home. Then he came back the next month, and the next. What he took from those rooms was a specific and load-bearing piece of information: other people were living with this, and they were okay. Mowry describes that as his turning point, and it is worth understanding why it worked. Isolation is not just a side effect of a mental health challenge. It is the part that supplies the evidence for hopelessness, because if you are the only person this has happened to, there is no proof that anyone comes out of it. Sitting in the back of a room, saying nothing, was enough to break that logic.
The Difference Between Accepting Your Situation and Giving Up On It
The idea Mowry returns to most often is one he calls acceptance without resignation. Accepting that you have a mental health challenge is, in his experience, the necessary first move, because you cannot work with something you refuse to name. Resignation is the different and far more dangerous thing. Resignation is the conclusion that this is the permanent shape of your life.
The distinction matters because the two get confused constantly, and people avoid acceptance precisely because they think it means surrender. Mowry’s version separates them. You can hold both the honest assessment and the open ending at the same time. For anyone in the middle of a hard chapter, the practical version of this is to notice which one you are actually doing when you say you have accepted something, because acceptance leaves room for the next step and resignation removes it.
“We can accept our situation without resigning ourselves to it.”
~ Dave Mowry
Looking for the Humor Interrupts the Trauma Loop
Here is the mechanism Mowry describes, in his own terms. Before the comedy class, hearing a certain song sent him straight into reliving the loss of his businesses, with the sweating and blurred vision of a full panic attack. After the class, the same song arrived, and he had somewhere else to put it. Instead of following the memory down, he asked a different question: where is the humor in that?
He is clear about what that question is doing. It is not erasing the memory, and it is not making the loss smaller. It is giving the mind a competing task at the exact moment it would otherwise begin its usual descent. Mowry says it changed the way he thought and changed the pathways in his brain, and he frames the material honestly, noting that the more challenges a person has been through, the more material they have to work with. He had a great deal of material. The reader’s takeaway is not that they need to write jokes. It is that a reliable trigger can be met with a redirect that is prepared in advance rather than improvised while the panic is already rising.
Why Saying the Hard Thing Out Loud Takes Its Power Away
In Mowry’s classes, nothing is off the table. The group talks openly about loss, about suicidal thoughts, about the promiscuity that can come with mania, about the things people carry silently for decades. He describes it as part support group and part comedy group, and he says he talked about things in that room he had never said out loud before.
When he performs, one of his most reliably effective jokes is a gentle one about suicide. He watches the audience take half a beat, and then they laugh, and afterward people come up to thank him for saying it. His explanation is worth taking seriously. Getting suicide out into the open, rather than leaving it buried, is what makes the difference. A thought that cannot be said grows in isolation and takes on the weight of a secret. Mowry saw the same thing when he later worked as a NAMI peer support specialist with a young man who arrived sullen and dark, and who left smiling, because someone had finally been willing to talk about the thing directly instead of around it.
The Smallest Possible Move Is Still a Move
Mowry’s other rule is a commitment not to get stuck, and what makes it useful is how small he is willing to let the moves be. During his worst years, getting out of bed and reaching the couch was the accomplishment of the day. When he got downstairs, he sat in a different chair, or a different spot on the same couch, and that was it. That was the entire action.
He still practices a version of it. He takes his medications in a different order each day, left to right, then right to left, then starting from the middle, for no reason other than to keep from settling into a groove. Mowry is describing something people in deep depression already know and rarely get credit for, which is that showering can be genuinely out of reach. He went weeks without one. The point of the rule is that it sets the bar somewhere a person in that state can actually clear, and small successes are what accumulate into movement.
Recovery Usually Starts With Grief, Not Optimism
Asked where someone should begin, Mowry does not start with hope. He starts with grief. He went through the stages of it, and his advice is to feel what you have lost, honor it, and resist the urge to push it away. Burying it is what he means by dismissing pain, and dismissing it is the opposite of working with it.
The contrast he draws is precise. When he buried a feeling, he did nothing with it, and it stayed exactly as heavy. When he took it out to look for the joke in it, he had to turn it over and examine it from several angles first, and he says that step alone was healing before any humor showed up. That is the useful insight for someone not remotely ready to laugh at anything. The examination is doing work on its own.
Keep Trying, Even in the Smallest Way
What makes Dave Mowry’s story land is that he does not describe recovery as a decision. He describes it as an accumulation. A meeting he sat through without speaking. A different spot on the couch. A joke he thought was funny while he was still in a psychiatric unit. None of those were turning points on the day they happened, and all of them turned out to be.
He also refuses the idea that people who live with mental illness are fragile. He has been told, in various ways, that they need protecting, and he responds that some of the strongest people he knows are the ones who have had their lives shattered and came out the other side anyway. He believes they have earned the right to say to themselves, good job, you did not give up.
If there is one thing to carry out of this, it is his sequence, which is smaller than most advice and more usable because of it. Accept the situation without resigning yourself to it. Let yourself grieve. Then do the smallest thing available so you do not get stuck. Mowry spent fourteen years believing none of that was possible, and he has spent the years since teaching other people that it is.
** If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available in the U.S. by call or text, any time of day. **
