David Granirer is a counsellor, stand-up comic, the author of The Happy Neurotic: How Fear and Angst can lead to Happiness and Success, and the founder of Stand Up For Mental Health. David lives with his wife and two kids in Vancouver, BC. David lives with depression and is an advocate for destigmatization of mental illness. He speaks very openly about his experience with mental illness. For his program, Stand Up For Mental Health, David teaches stand-up comedy to people with mental illness as a way of increasing their self-esteem and allowing them to change their perception of their own mental health journeys. At the end of the classes, the groups do graduation shows, where they help to reduce stigma, discrimination, and prejudice surrounding mental illness and encourage people to talk about it. Stand Up For Mental Health runs classes from coast to coast in Canada. David also teaches stand-up comedy classes at Langara College in Vancouver and does Fighting Stigma in the Workplace and Laughter in the Workplace presentations. Granirer's father and grandparents were Romanian Jews, and concentration camp survivors. 

Canada