“I walked outside devastated after that happened on Howard Stern, thinking this was the end,” he continued. “Number one, I had embarrassed and humiliated my kids and my family, who were in school at the time, talking about…that their dad is mental. And I’ll never work again — who’s gonna hire somebody that has a mental health problem? And I didn’t know what to do. I was contemplating running straight into traffic in Manhattan there, standing on the sidewalk, when somebody came up to me and said, ‘Are you Howie Mandel?’ And I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘I just heard you on Howard Stern.’ And my heart just sunk into my stomach, and I go, ‘This is it.’ But then he went, ‘Me too. … I suffer from it too, and it was so good to hear you talk.'” Mandel then started receiving letters from others thanking him for speaking on his condition. He would later become much more open about it.
