When someone kills themselves or suffers from depression/substance abuse, we’re quick to ask why and point out the external factors: poverty, bad childhood, or lack of support (financial, personal, or medical).
I think we do this because the external factors are visible and so easier to credit. Plus, it has us look at ourselves and ask, “What more could we have done?”
Or we look at who’s to blame: “If only [name or group] did/didn’t do [action].”
For the impoverished who suffer, we can the credit their condition, their treatment from others, or their lack of resources.
But then a rich man in America 2014, a human with literally more resources at his disposal than anyone in history, decides to kill himself. Robin Williams died a year ago on Tuesday.
Well, people still looked at the external: marriage challenges, his canceled TV show, and a recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease. Taken together, failures in love, profession, and health can appear a perfect storm that even a rich and famous person can’t overcome. But this idea floats only when you don’t consider that all people suffer professional and romantic challenges and that the vast majority of people diagnosed with Parkinson’s don’t kill themselves.
Robin Williams killed himself not because of external circumstances but because he suffered from mental illness. And the seriousness of it is evidenced by the fact that he had the best comforts money could buy, the best therapy, the best treatment centers–which he had recently completed, the best doctors, the best medication, etc.
It still wasn’t enough.
We hesitate to credit mental illness because it’s so difficult to imagine life with depression if you don’t have it. To feel chronic lowliness, the objective feeling of not wanting to do anything, of asking, “what’s the point?”, of having to regularly feel that which normal people feel only occasionally as a consequence of difficult circumstances.
And it turns out that severe depression wasn’t the only mental condition which Williams suffered. He was diagnosed with dementia with paranoia, which doctors said was the deciding factor in his choice to take his life.
That there was nothing anyone could do for Robin Williams is a discouraging reality. But it’s also encouraging. That a beloved man of means would still choose to hang himself by a belt in his closet should have us realize our current remedies are inadequate and so encourage us to devote increased money and manpower to a new avenue of medicine: finding and curing the biological reasons for mental illness.
Once we crack the code and repair brains that predispose people to a life of struggle, we’re going to see a new age of recovery, and mental illness will be a thing of the past.
I appreciate your empathetic essay. Mental illness is something everyone needs to recognize and support solutions, and most especially to start showing some empathy toward those afflicted — and there are many. This might be the most significant social problem we are facing in this country.