This is not a Robin Williams tribute, I don’t have a license
to provide that. This is a
commiseration, brother to brother.
Another brother carried away by depression. The ever thinning ranks! Wish us luck, those of us who still
struggle. That is, if you haven’t run
out of patience with our “doom and gloom,” and that is, if you had any patience
in the first place! Get over it! What do you have to be depressed about? I would go on, but it would get personal very
quickly.
They say that heart disease is the “hidden killer,” but at
least when you die from heart disease the living will believe that you had an
actual condition that led to your death.
They may even be compassionate, unless, of course, they’re too busy
blaming that on you too. After all, you
ate butter or something. People can be
cold. There are many ways to die from
depression, but for many people there are even more ways to prove that
depression had nothing to do with it, or, in the alternative, that it was your
own damn fault.
The terrible truth:
while it is easy to imagine what it is like to suffer from some terrible
cancer, as easy as it would be to imagine dying from a heart attack or a
stroke, it is difficult, ten times as difficult, for the unexperienced to
imagine what it is like to suffer from major depression.
Yes, I’m going to split hairs here and dismiss mere
situational depression. If a beloved
parent dies unexpectedly, a bereaved son or daughter may suffer from
depression-like symptoms, for a time. That
is a horse of an entirely different color.
Life will reassert itself in these erstwhile sufferers, and they will
regain their cheerful demeanor. Sufferers
of major, or clinical depression, are not so lucky. For them it is a lifetime sentence.
I feel bad about Robin Williams, but part of me is envious
of him. He had a good life. There were ups and downs, and his personal
life got a bit messy from time to time, but it was a good life after all. He left behind a few children who seem to
have loved him, and his third and final wife seems like a nice woman who loved
him. Good for him! I’m very glad that he had those things. He also leaves behind a body of work that
anyone would be proud of, a lifetime of entertaining us that we should be
eternally grateful for, and a sterling reputation as one of the funniest people
ever to walk in the shoes of the show business.
Most of us would be very proud of, and satisfied with, that legacy. If I took the same route as Robin, all that I
would leave behind would be a few things that no one wants, with nary a ripple
in the larger pool.
And then, we are reminded, Robin Williams resorted to
self-medication to deal with his “demons.”
(I do love this subtle semantic demonization of all depression
sufferers.) I resort to it myself! And who could blame us for seeking islands of
rest in the storm of our lives? Alcohol
is a woefully inadequate tool for any of its usual uses, but it does work at
some level. I have often referred to
alcohol as a place, not so much an intoxicant as a separate reality that you
can go to almost at will. A couple of
cocktails and you are somewhere else, all of the rules have changed, things may
seem more tolerable, certain habitual behaviors may fade into the background. Throw in a couple of Percocets and you’re on
another planet altogether. There are
available drugs and combinations that will deliver you to other universes. It’s all temporary of course, and it does no
lasting good, but it works.
Non-sufferers, you . . . oh!
I almost said a bad word!
Non-sufferers are very hard on us for self-medicating. Sometimes they go so far as to suggest that
the self-medicating behavior is the very CAUSE of our depression. This putting of the cart before the horse
serves two purposes: for one thing, it
proves that they are better than the sufferer; and for another thing, it proves
that the sufferer is responsible for his or her own condition. This works for the non-sufferer on several
levels. It restores order to their
world, and it allows them to withdraw support and affection from the sufferer
without drawing blame upon themselves. I
have experienced this phenomenon, and I condemn it. If there were a God, It would visit the
practitioners with boils.
Oh! But don’t we have wonderful new medicines with which to
combat depression? SSRI’s, and endorphin
enhancers? My reading on the subject
mirrors my own experience: they do work,
but only for a few years. By then the
brain has compensated and it’s back to the Merry-Go-Round.
Depression and suicide go hand in glove. Depressed
people kill themselves when they reach the “I can’t do this anymore”
moment. The terrible instant when the
entire horizon is taken up with a cry of “not another fucking minute!” It’s a horrible thing, and it does probably
have a bad effect on those loved ones left behind, but perhaps it’s not
exclusively horrible. It does, after
all, end the suffering. Maybe people who
kill themselves get exactly what they want.
Should we be happy for them? Or
at least, should we not understand that in exercising the power that they had
over their own lives they might have been achieving something that they really
wanted? Something that had been long
denied them? Isn’t Peace a wonderful
gift?
I see that Robin Williams once said in an interview that he
would sometimes hear a little voice when he was standing at some high place, a
little voice telling him to “jump.” We
hear that little voice frequently over the course of our lives, we
sufferers. It presents itself as a
reasonable alternative to going on living.
So it is no surprise that many people finally give in to the
suggestion.
I don’t endorse suicide as a solution to depression. To depression sufferers I only offer that
death comes soon enough anyway, on its own motion, and there’s no real need to
hurry it along. That is the blessing and
the curse of this earthly life: as
terrible as it is, it doesn’t go on for very long.
There is some talk in the media that the suicide of such a
beloved figure as Robin Williams will lead society to a new understanding of
depression, and it is tempting to think that it might. That would be nice. Destigmatization would be nice; new and better
drugs might be an achievable goal; easier affordable access to appropriate
counseling would certainly help. Let’s
face it though, society famously lacks compassion regarding depressives. Get over it!
That’s the common cry from the non-sufferers. As though we chose to be depressed, and could
just as easily chose to not be depressed anymore. Family and friends expend their stores of
compassion before long, if they had any compassion to begin with. America in particular is not generous with
money towards problems that are nebulous if not invisible, nor is America
generous in spirit to those who exhibit a condition that renders them “others.” It is likely that nothing will change just
because Robin Williams killed himself.
I say to those who suffer from depression, please carry
on. Please live. Please take any and all available measures to
protect yourselves from the worst effects of your affliction. Learn to spot your triggers and pull back
from your usual negative reactions to them; learn to comfort yourselves; learn
about your condition in the hopes that understanding will make the suffering
easier to bear; recall that you do not suffer alone. Please be as happy as you can be. Love yourselves, as I love you, my brothers
and sisters. Please live.
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