Joe Pantoliano Got Help For His Depression and So Can You

famous face from Hollywood is helping people with mental illness. You know him as a TV and movie tough guy, but Joe Pantoliano was in North Haven Thursday morning with a much different message. You probably know Pantoliano from The Matrix, The Fugitive, and The Sopranos. What you probably didn’t know is that he suffers from clinical depression. That’s because, for years, he didn’t know he had it. Now he’s talking about it so other people can get help like he did. “We’re running away from our problems. We’re drugging our feelings away,” Pantoliano told a packed breakfast at Fantasia in North Haven. “We’re not talking our feelings away.” The famous actor and director ran and drugged his own problems away for years. He can laugh about his family’s problems now. “I never thought my mother was mentally ill. I just thought she was Italian-American,” he told the crowd, to a big laugh. In an interview with News8, he then said of his family’s mental illness, “We had it in our family and I didn’t even know it. I didn’t know that the family dysfunction had a mental component to it.” He says he spent years using food, alcohol and drugs to try to hide the pain he always had inside. Now, however, he shares his diagnosis of clinical depression with groups like the one this morning. It was the annual fundraiser for the Clifford Beers Clinic. The clinic provides mental health services to thousands of children in the New Haven area. Chief Executive Officer Alice Forrester said their experts recently did mental health assessments of middle school aged children in the inner city. “We’re finding 45-50% of the kids have full-blown PTSD,” she said. Yes, half the kids had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Pantoliano found out just how prevalent mental illness is when he started telling people the plot of his 2006 movie “Canvas.” “What happens to a family when mental illness is introduced into a family,” Pantoliano explained. “So people would say, ‘No kidding, me too, my brother is…’ Or, ‘No kidding, me too, my mother.’ ‘No kidding, me too, my sister.” That led Pantoliano to direct a documentary he titled “No Kidding! Me 2!” The film explores all kinds of mental illness, or dis-ease as Pantoliano puts it. He also created the No Kidding, Me 2! foundation to try to reduce the stigma of mental illness. “People don’t get help because they’re ashamed to ask for it. There’s that shame component,” said Pantoliano.