Several months ago, one of the click-bait titles that popped up frequently on the Internet was “11 Female Stars Who Used to be Hot.”
Would Robin Williams, 63, have clicked on that story to see which formerly hot actresses were now considered past their prime? Or would he have looked at that link and wondered how soon before someone posted a list of “11 Comedians Who Used to be Funny.”
Show business, for all its glory, is a cruel place to grow old – even for the biggest stars.
Worrying about getting washed up is enough to depress anyone, especially someone who already is inclined to depression and has had problems with drugs and alcohol.
A couple of days after he died, Williams’ wife told NBC that her husband’s sobriety was intact, but in addition to struggling with depression and anxiety, he was also dealing with the early stages of Parkinson’s disease and wasn’t ready to make that news public.
By now, though, Williams’ suicide has been attributed to depression. The media quickly rounded up mental health experts and people suffering from depression to talk about mental illness and suicide. A recurrent theme has been that these topics carry a stigma, and nobody wants to talk about them.
Williams would probably find humor in that: Everybody talking about something that supposedly nobody talks about.
He might even point to some of the movies he made: In “Dead Poets Society,” one of his character’s students commits suicide.
In “World’s Greatest Dad,” Williams plays a father and a frustrated writer, whose son dies in an auto-erotic suicide while masturbating. To spare the kid embarrassment, Williams’ character makes his son’s death look like a regular suicide. His son’s popularity immediately rises, along with publicity about his death. The dad exploits the situation by composing a fake journal from his son and passing it off as the work of a suicidal youth.
If mental illness and suicide still have so much stigma attached to them, how is it that the media and popular culture (books, music, movies, TV) are filled with stories about the mentally ill and the suicidal? Perhaps some people have something to gain by insisting that these subjects need to be discussed even more.
Fine. Go ahead and discuss.
But remember that just because someone doesn’t want to listen to you talk about your mental illness or depression does not mean they are stigmatizing you. It may simply mean they don’t like talking about illness, whether it’s a blow-by-blow description of a colonoscopy or the details of childbirth. (I’ve known guys who would flee any room when a female started describing where she was when her water broke. They were certainly not going to stick around for the cutting of the cord or a discussion of milk production.)
People are different. If you want people to respect how you are different, be prepared to accord them the same respect. While it’s unreasonable to expect the severely mentally ill to make that accommodation, it is a reasonable request of others with varying degrees of mental illness. Treating someone like an equal is not stigmatizing them.
“Stop thinking about it as a sensitive topic,” Dr. Drew Pinsky told an interviewer. “Think of it like a topic like any other medical condition, like a cardiac problem, or a lung problem; it just happens to affect the brain.”
There is a difference, though. It’s harder to fake a cardiac problem or lung problem. With mental illness there’s more room for posing and acting out.
Some of us don’t have to look too far to find an example of a person who has taken life’s unavoidable disappointments, let them snowball into an avalanche and then screamed for rescue. The first few times, you want to help. Several more times, and you start to wonder if you’re being used.
In a 2006 interview with Terry Gross on “Fresh Air,” which was replayed this week, Williams sounded like a man who avoided self-pity and recognized that everyone has problems. He flatly stated that he did not have clinical depression.
“No clinical depression, no. … I get bummed like I think a lot of us do at certain times. You look at the world and go, whoa. And then other moments you’ll look and go, oh, things are OK… .”
He told Gross that he had spent years in psychotherapy. She wondered if people like him were “talk-therapy proof,” so skilled at using words to get around things that they could not be disarmed by a therapist.
“Well, you can disarm yourself,” he replied. “You could lay down the arms, and basically that’s the purpose of therapy. At a certain point, if you’re just going in to say, ‘Hey, look, I can really shuck this guy,’ that’s not the purpose really. Eventually, at a certain point, you have to say, ‘OK, what do you want to do? Why are you doing this?’ … Because the idea is to kind of get to the point of realizing what are the issues that you could, you know, confront yourself. … You know, like you said, if you can talk your way around it, then all you’re doing is just kind of, you know, self-replicating. OK, continue the behavior and never change. As one therapist said, ‘Change is not a hobby… .’”
Then, because he was Robin Williams, he offered a brilliant, funny one-liner: “And as the one guy at the suicide hotline said, ‘Life isn’t for everybody.’”
No, it isn’t. And death is universal.
The day after Williams’ highly-publicized suicide, actress Lauren Bacall died a quieter and more predictable death at age 89.
In the look-back on her life, the reviews included the highs – her marriage to Humphrey Bogart. And the lows – losing him so soon and later being written off as a has-been when she still had much to give.
She told an interviewer in 1996 that she hadn’t been happy for years.
“Contented, yes; pleased and proud, yes. But happy, no.”
For many on this planet, that would be plenty. She did acknowledge that she had been lucky.
“You just learn to cope with whatever you have to cope with. I spent my childhood in New York, riding on subways and buses. And you know what you learn if you’re a New Yorker? The world doesn’t owe you a damn thing.”
Likewise, Williams didn’t owe us 89 years of living. He chose his method of death at age 63.
If it turns out that his fear of Parkinson’s disease drove his decision, someone will probably point to Linda Ronstadt and say she’s living with Parkinson’s disease. Good for her.
Robin Williams had a different idea.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
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