Wayne Brady’s Wife, Mandie Taketa, Helped Him Through Depression Despite Divorce

Wayne Brady’s wife, Mandie Taketa, may have divorced him years ago, but the actor credits his ex-wife for helping him through his battle with depression.

In a related report by The Inquisitr, Robin Williams’ suicide hit fellow comedian Wayne Brady very hard since he had also been suffering from depression. But he also revealed that keeping his clinical depression secret was causing him to reach a dark point in his life.

“”It starts this cycle where you tell yourself these lies… and those lies become true to you. So, you stick to your own truth you’ve set up. ‘If I am this bad, then why should any of this matter?’ I feel at that point, you end up wanting to stop the pain.”

The worst part was when he hit his 42nd birthday in June and he had a “complete breakdown.” But Wayne Brady’s wife, Mandie Taketa, worked with him to pull it all together.

“It took me a while to get my stuff together to go, ‘You know what? If you’re not happy, you have to do something it,'” Brady said. “Just to admit that you are feeling this way is a huge step. To claim that, to say, ‘Why do I feel dark? Why do I feel unhappy? Let me do something about this.'”

It turns out that Wayne Brady’s wife is actually his neighbor. Taketa moved into the same neighborhood so that they could raise their daughter, Maile, together without having a large commute.

“We said we want to give Maile the closest experience to living in the same house. We have always lived in different homes. We just live super close now,” Brady says. “The fact of the matter is I like her mom … she was with me when no one else in the world was with me, except my mom. There was loyalty, there was trust, she is my baby mama.”

Brady, who grew up in Orlando, Florida, also says he has been trying to shift some of his work back to his home state.

“You hope people will come out and see you because you’re a local boy, but also it just puts me in mind of being back home,” Brady told the Orlando Sentinel. “It makes me think about where I got my start.”