'And he goes, 'Yeah, your mental illness was kind of like your middle name. I didn't know what it was, but I knew that you had one,'" she said.

Of humor and hurt

At the Disco Death Comedy Show, a monthly showcase in an Uptown record store, many of the featured comics are in their 20s or early 30s. On any given night, roughly half of them will bring up mental health.

"I had to stop drinking while taking antidepressants recently," said Tia Hannes, 25, during her recent set there. "Don't take away the one thing that makes me happy!"

Host Pearl Rose believes being upfront is a way to connect with audiences.

"We are wanting to take private experiences and make them public, shared experiences," she said after a show. "I go through it. You might have been here, too. Sometimes things are so heavy, all you can really do is laugh about it."

Listening to comics be so open can be comforting to audience members struggling with their own disorders and demons.

Chinmoy Gulrajani, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota, calls humor a mature defense mechanism, which means it's a healthy way to process difficult subjects.

"The audience is able to connect with them and see that celebrities can also suffer from the same symptoms," he said. "When a dialogue is created, a subject is no longer hush-hush. It's something people aren't ashamed to discuss."

But Gulrajani warns that comics need to be careful.

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