Tanmay Bhat shares post on battling clinical depression after #MeToo; Aditi Mittal criticises AIB founder

Comedian-writer Tanmay Bhat has revealed he is suffering from clinical depression and is worried he might never get back to being who he was or “operating to my potential”. Bhat, co-founder of comedy group All India Bakchod (AIB), was under attack for his inaction in the complaints against comic Utsav Chakraborty during the #MeToo movement in October 2018. Last month, AIB announced that Bhat will step down from the post of CEO and the company’s YouTube channel is “dead for the foreseeable future”. In a series of Instagram videos shared on Saturday, the comedian said he sometimes gets “super worried” thinking that his state of “paralysis is permanent”. “After everything that happened in October, I’m mentally checked out. I feel almost paralysed and unable to participate socially, online or even offline. A big part of my self worth growing up as someone who looked like me became my work. For most of my adult I life I worked at a company that I was trying to build. Letting the office go, all the people who worked with us, having to say good bye to that took a toll on me mentally and physically. Which finally came to a headway around the end of last year,” he said. The comedian said doctors diagnosed him with clinical depression and told him to “consider doing something about it.” Check out Tanmay Bhat’s video on his mental health

Bhat thanked those who wrote supportive messages on his worst days, which were immensely helpful. “It’s nice to know there are still people out there who are rooting for us and me. I am still clueless about any answers to questions like when will I be back and doing what. I don’t know. I’m still feeling extremely paralysed to even put out this message because in my head no one wants to work with a depressed comedian and that’s an oxymoron. But at some point, I just got to get up and start fixing this stuff. I owed you guys a thank you. That’s all for now,” he concluded. Bhat, who was one of the judges panel in the first season of Amazon Prime Video India Original Comicstaan, is not returning for the upcoming second run . Bhat’s posts have drawn a strong reaction from fellow stand-up comedian Aditi Mittal. In a series of posts, she has divulged how Bhat had been compliant of (or simply ignored) verbal harassment that Aditi faced by other male comedians. Check out Aditi Mittal’s tweets

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Adding that Utsav had slut-shamed her, Aditi explains why Mahima Kukreja’s revelations during the #MeToo movement got her so riled up.

Aditi further criticised Tanmay for using depression to probably gain sympathy. The artiste sarcastically termed it as “apparently depression is only newsworthy when someone who had corporates throwing money at him stopped having money thrown at him.”

(With inputs from agencies)