Also talking about Robin Williams here instead of Facebook

[marlowe1]

I like the fact that people are being more cognizant of clinical depression because of Robin Williams. I like the fact that the internet brings us together when we are most isolated. I like the fact that I am working at a job that sees me on my couch writing boring crap and I can still interact with human beings - even if only by joking on Facebook. What is bothering me is this weird positivity around helping people with depression or helping people with their issues. Sure, people do help other people all the time. We support each other. We let each other know that we're not alone. But when it comes to being in a bad mental state, we can't save anyone. We can't rescue them.

I don't think that I have clinical depression. I do know that I normalized a lot of behavior and attitudes that are depression including the ability to focus on one woman and act like she's the only woman who could ever make me happy (even now when I know that it's irrational and stupid - I can't just turn it off. I got to work through it with every obsessive step. Makes things easier if I am attracted to a woman with problems because she won't run away quite so fast) And when I wake up and it falls away, I am left wondering. But also I went through a bad July. It's a deeper issue, a certain fragility going on.

But with Robin Williams - I wish people would stop telling others how to deal with suicide and stop acting like they know better. I wish people would stop saying things like "if only he knew how beloved he was" - he knew.

And the irony lies in the fact that he was beloved because he was the whacky adult - the one jumping off the walls who was way more fun than our way too tired parents. And when we got older and found Robin Williams just as exhausting as our parents found us at that age, we could appreciate his more serious stuff. Or some of us still loved Patch Adams. There's no accounting for taste.

But that whacky jumping off the walls persona - that was a man fighting his depression in the best way he knew how. And he got the love and the adulation of the crowd every night.

One of the most disturbing things I ever saw with Williams was that HBO special from the early 80s. I don't remember most of the jokes (there was the Mr. Happy routine) so much as him in a flop sweat for the entire show. But someone decided to put a camera on him in the dressing room when it was over. He was drained and tired and just a mess. And of course, he would have been that drained because he was just running around stage in the highest energy possible. But for me - when I was 10 - it felt like a betrayal. The mask had slipped down and instead of the wild clown, the man before us was a tired and broken man who just wanted to get away from the camera. He was too tired to keep the act up.

I don't know. The man fought with depression for 63 yeas (ok it probably didn't come on until his teen years) and then recently, he decided that he didn't want to fight anymore. He probably made that decision many times in his life (overtly and covertly with the drugs) and this time he managed to make it without changing his mind. Could someone have changed his mind, thrown him a lifeline, etc.? Maybe. And perhaps people have been doing it for years.

I guess I feel like the decision to stop struggling with it and just go is just as valid as the decision to keep fighting and struggling. I don't want to say that on Facebook where the majority of people I know are reading it. I know that this could be interpreted as me being an insensitive fuck or engaging in suicidal ideation. I am doing neither. I don't even know where I'm going with this - beyond a kneejerk distaste for such saccharine "oh if only we could save him" statements. And I also don't like the suicide hotline people ordering everyone to refrain from talking about the suicide in details. Do they think that people contemplating suicide are only prevented from doing so because they don't know how?

I guess where my mind is going right now and it may need revising is that Robin Williams was an adult. He had problems. He made a decision that he probably had made many times before and we all saw him struggling with the depression. He wasn't a child that needed to be rescued from a burning building. Could he have been saved if he had been forced into a better therapy or treatment program or forced to live until he got out of the depression bubble? Sure. Maybe. But he was a grown adult and he killed himself. And that's sad for us. But we should not impose some polyanna belief system on his life and death in order to make ourselves feel better.

Comments

[xjenavivex.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[marlowe1.livejournal.com]

Oh good. I was actually worried. I feel like I am going against a lot of the FB wisdom where people keep posting these "what you need to understand about depression" and it seems like Depression is a lot like cancer. It wears people down and at a certain point they choose not to keep going. Ok, it's not completely like cancer since cancer gets steadily worse if it's not in remission and depression can go into remission and act up without any expectations of where it's going.

But someone posted that Cracked article that went "well naturally funny people kill themselves because they are all trying to hide from the world with those jokes" and now I'm worried that any joke I tell in the next week will be met with "are you ok?"

[xjenavivex.livejournal.com]

The thing is, he was the only person that would really know when it was time. And I don't think it was all about the jokes. I also don't think it was all about the career as someone posted. It is always more than that and in some cases it isn't even related. Hell my depression can be worsened by life, but things don't have to be going to hell for it to get the better of me.

[marlowe1.livejournal.com]

I think that's the better part of this discussion - people actually being taught that depression is not necessarily an event-based illness. Sure, things can exacerbate it but the working definition of clinical depression has it occurring independent of outside trauma.

It's also why I don't think that I have depression even though I tend to get into very depressive states and behave in ways that indicate some serious issues. Most of the things that I do that are depressive (addictive behavior, going off on people, needing to be funny, etc.) tend to happen when there are outside things going on. And I am definitely not the same as I was when I was a teenager. Or even when I was in my late 20s and attempting to completely change my personality to reflect a healthy religiosity. In most of these cases I can point to a broken relationship or a frustration with a relative or circumstance in my life.

Granted, I did have a way of making my coping mechanism into part of the problem. Those obsessive crushes went on forever and by the time they were over, the thing that I was distracting myself away from was resolved and the obsessive infatuation was the only problem.

[xjenavivex.livejournal.com]

I'm diagnosed mixed episode, rapid, cycling, bipolar. It makes for fun times in my head. It doesn't behave strictly as manic or depressive which was why the diagnosis was so hard. I finally got help after the "black water" which is what it felt like went on and on for so long with no break. I was surprised it wasn't just depression.

It is good that you know yourself well enough to be sure. After the diagnosis, I started associating what goes on in my head and how I interact with others with the filter that bipolar often places on these things. It started making more sense. It was great to have that clarity and also to see some coping mechanisms already in place.

Thank you for this discussion.

[rap541.livejournal.com]

I don't think you're being insensitive. Tho personally, I am on record noting I didn't think the breaking headlines over how EXACTLY the man killed himself were appropriate.

I feel bad for his family and feel bad for him knowing that some of his act was him flailing for help.

[marlowe1.livejournal.com]

Well those headlines would have been more helpful last night when I was recommending World's Greatest Dad as the movie to watch. That's the one where he plays a guy who finds his son dead from auto-erotic asphyxiation and makes it look like a suicide.

Thus I have recommended the most inappropriate movie possible. I might as well recommend Trainspotting after Philip Seymour Hoffman died.

[howlin-wolf-66.livejournal.com]

I agree that we shouldn't act like we understand other people's pain, or know what's best for them... but it's scary as an outsider to watch that happening to ANYONE. To know that you can do everything within your power, and it still might not make any difference... That feels uncomfortably like giving up on someone, when there's a chance that being proactive could help them to pull out of it... and throwing my hands up and proclaiming 'all is lost' just doesn't sit well with me...

However, maybe I just have to realise that, from my perspective as a bystander, that's MY problem, and not the issue of the sufferer.

[marlowe1.livejournal.com]

It doesn't sit well with anyone. We all want to save people.

[howlin-wolf-66.livejournal.com]

... but ... is this post falling on the side of 'we shouldn't'? ... because I know of no developed society that would tolerate that - although clearly, there are individuals who would.

[marlowe1.livejournal.com]

More like we have to accept that we can't always save people. We can love them and support them in their struggles but that's not always going to work and we can't shout them into wellness - especially with long term disorders like depression, addiction, cancer, etc.

[howlin-wolf-66.livejournal.com]

That, I can agree with.