Mental health matters to former ‘Blue’s Clues’ host
“Blue’s Clues” fans will remember Steve Burns fondly for his role as “Steve,” a gentle adult living in an imaginary world of talking salt-shakers, mailboxes and other friendly household objects. The original host of Nick Jr.’s award-winning TV show, “Blue’s Clues,” clad in a familiar striped green shirt, Steve encouraged preschool-aged children to help him decipher what message energetic puppy, “Blue,” was trying to communicate each episode with her pawprint-marked clues.
The show was a smash hit for Nickelodeon, earning the network not only high ratings but eight consecutive Daytime Emmy nominations, as well as a prestigious Peabody Award in 2001 for its “play-along, think-along” approach to learning.
What people
didn’t know, says
Burns, is that his mental health suffered all throughout the series.
Burns has said his character required him to play the part of someone full of “constant wonder and joy.” In real life, Burns amassed a crushing weight of self-doubt.
“You don’t fight depression, you collect it,” Burns said, speaking to a packed theater in Arkansas last April, according to an article that ran in the Democrat Gazette.
‘Blue’s Clues’ actor Steve Burns opens up to audiences about mental health
In multiple interviews since his departure from “Blue’s Clues,” Burns has opened up about his battles with mental health, telling Variety Magazine in November 2022 that he was “struggling with clinical depression” during his entire tenure on the popular children’s show.
“There was a cost,” he told Variety, “after years and years of going to the well,” trying to scoop out some joy he could use for the show.
“My job description was to be the happiest man in North America,” Burns told founder and CEO of Childhood Cancer Society Tommy Head last October during an interview uploaded to YouTube. “Most days I was very much not that. I had to provide a generation with self-esteem when I was struggling with my own approval.”
Steve Burns: Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness. His character on ‘Blue’s Clues’ did it all the time
It wasn’t until after leaving “Blue’s Clues” in 2006, Burns has told interviewers, that he hit a wall — his depression felt unmanageable. As Burns struggled, he looked back at his former char
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