David Granirer

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. Granirer lives with his wife and two children in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Granirer advocates for the destigmatization of mental illness and speaks openly about his experience with depression.[1] In his program, Stand Up For Mental Health, Granirer 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.[2] 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.

Granirer also teaches stand-up comedy classes at Langara College in Vancouver and does Fighting Stigma in the Workplace and Laughter in the Workplace presentations.[3][4]

His father and grandparents were Romanian Jews that had survived concentration camps.[5]