“Blues Clues” star, Steve Burns, reflects on the “Soul Boom” podcast about struggling with depression and facing death rumors.

If you’re a nineties baby, you may remember the last episode of the educational kids’ show, “Blue’s Clues,” when viewers were told Steve, the character, was leaving for college. The departure happened in April 2002, and the educational host was replaced by his good friend, Joe, who completed the fifth and sixth seasons.

When asked about his departure during an interview with Variety, Burns revealed that he was losing hair, which would have forced him to wear a wig on the television show. In addition, Burns felt that it was simply time.

“I didn’t know it yet, but I was the happiest depressed person in North America,” he said in the interview published Nov. 16. “I was struggling with severe clinical depression the whole time I was on that show. It was my job to be utterly full of joy and wonder at all times, and that became impossible.”

“I was always able to dig and find something that felt authentic to me that was good enough to be on the show,” Burns continued, “but after years and years of going to the well without replenishing it, there was a cost.”

READ NEXT: TEENS LAUNCH ” THE NICK & JJ SHOW” TO INSPIRE AND EMPOWER NEXT GENERATION

In a recent podcast with Rainn Wilson, Steve Burns expressed great pain he experienced after departing the show due to people assuming that he either died or committed suicide.

After I left the show, this rumor continued, and one of the most common things people would say to me was: ‘I thought you were dead.’”

“I was in kind of the throes of this depression after I left the show. But what a lot of people don’t understand is that that during the show, the Internet was beginning to Internet and the world decided, or a large portion of the world decided, that I had died.” Burns went on to acknowledge the many rumors that began to surface at the time — that he had died of an overdose, or of suicide — saying, “that is not what you want to hear when you’re severely clinically depressed.”

When a gazillion people you’ve never met tell you that you’re dead … It’s bad when you’re severely clinically depressed,” Burns added. “And there was nothing I could do about this rumor. I mean, Nickelodeon didn’t like it either.”

Burns continued to say his appearances on talk shows such as The Rosie O’Donnell Show didn’t help, as people would still question his survival and spread falsehoods. “I was on one talk show where I danced with Busta Rhymes, and people still thought I was [dead] like, what else do you have to do?”

After the show ended, Burns began to struggle with an alcohol addiction, he said.

“I built a house in Brooklyn and never left it. I call it ‘the gray’ of my life,” he said on the podcast. “It was about 10 years where I did nothing but, like, drink couple of bottles of wine every night alone, watch MythBusters. … And just eat Pad Thai.” He continued on to say, “I gained like 50 pounds. I was completely unrecognizable,” he said.

The rumors of his death got so bad at points that even his own family members believed them, with Burns explaining how his mother once called him “crying in line from an Arby’s” to make sure he was okay.

He went on to say “When the belief of being dead persists for 10 years, it feels like a cultural preference…you start to feel like you’re supposed to be.”

Steve eventually sought help, he told Wilson on the podcast that he began working with a therapist and taking advice from his own former character.

“It just sounds so trite everytime I say this, but it’s true. That is when Steve became my teacher,” Burns said, referring to his character on Blue’s Clues, who had the same name as him. “It’s so woo-woo to say, but it real. Every day on Blue’s Clues, I would sit in a chair and look at someone in the eye and ask, ‘Will you help me?’ And it wasn’t until I did that in my real life, that things changed.”

It’s good to know that Steve is doing well!