Robin Williams has been dead for one year and three weeks. I was so SOMETHINGOROTHER, angry frustrated sad, when the autopsy three months later revealed Lewy body dementia -- a sign that his Parkinson's had progressed, a boulder in the stream of conversation that suddenly created two tributaries:
he was suffering from a terrible disease so of course he had good reason to die;
and maybe he wasn't in his right mind when he did it.
I've been what I've sometimes called "easily capable of being in touch with suicidal feelings" for most of my life, and when addressing them have usually either been glib enough that hey it can't really be a big deal, right, or used roundabout locutions that put some distance between MRMORTONTHESUBJECTOFTHESENTENCE (YT, yours truly, me me me meeeee) and just what exactly the predicate says he does.
It's Suicide Prevention Month. It's always some kind of month. There's always some coffee can on the counter, slit in the plastic lid, paper taped to the side, some reason for you not to pocket your change. I get it. I know.
What can I even say about Robin Williams? I loved Mork and Mindy before I was old enough to understand why. I loved little things like his vest and his red space suit and Exidor. (It's still a terrific show.) He was a huge part of everything that I understood or experienced about comedy growing up. There's a whole style of comedy, a whole flavor of presence, that no one else can touch without my comparing them to Robin Williams. And yes, there was Dead Poets Society, and yes he was great in Louie, and yes he had some startlingly good dramatic roles like One Hour Photo, but all of that pales next to his comedy for me. Not because it wasn't great but because Robin Williams being funny is ballet performed on the thin rim of the universe.
Why would I want to kill myself? I could tell you specifics about childhood traumas and how men who were abused as children often don't start dealing with that abuse until their 30s or 40s, carrying around a lot of PTSD baggage in the meantime. I could offer concise but empty answers like "a reasonable release from an unreasonable burden of trauma" or "mental illness/depression." The problem is that we tend to ask motive questions, "why would you do, why do you want" questions, in a certain way and expecting certain kinds of answers, and "why would you kill yourself?" is not the same kind of question as "why do you want to work at Viridian Dynamics?" or "why did you major in art?"
Robin Williams in The Fisher King is a revelation. Perry (RW) and Jack (Jeff Bridges) have both been shattered by the same traumatic event, a gunman egged on by Jack opening fire in a restaurant and killing a bunch of people, including Perry's wife. Jack has descended into self-loathing while denying any culpability or examining what kind of persona he was projecting for that gunman to be the kind of audience he attracted. Perry has retreated into delusions which simultaneously shield him from dealing with his loss and punish him for attempting to move on. It might be Terry Gilliam's best movie. It's almost certainly Robin's best performance, one of the few that can draw equally from his manic humor and his dramatic chops -- moreso, even, than Good Morning Vietnam.
In terms of signal to noise, here's the best thing I can say about suicide and me: I don't call myself a survivor of abuse because until it turns out that I've died of something other than suicide, how can I say for sure that the trauma never got the better of me?
There are certainly warning signs that may indicate someone needs help, but depression doesn't always look the way you think it looks, especially from the outside. And someone who's okay today might not be okay tomorrow. Nothing need happen overnight for that to be true.
Do I want to die?
I don't want to die.
Do I want to experience the pain of death?
I don't want that pain.
Do I want the anxiety and fear of all the mise en place of suicide, the knife, the pills, the blankets against the garage door, the note?
Ugh no.
Would I walk through a door that unmakes me, just magically removes me from everything?
There are a lot of times that sounds attractive.
Today I'm fine, today I'm good. I wasn't going to wait to write this blog entry until I was feeling low. Today is not a problem.
For a couple weeks we almost had a conversation. For a couple weeks people thought Robin Williams might have killed himself because of depression. For a couple weeks people had to deal with that. He wasn't a young guy -- we have a narrative for famous young suicides. He was famous and well-liked and had a great family and plenty to live for.
Suicide isn't about having been a failure in other peoples' eyes.
Suicide isn't about turning the Nintendo off because you're playing badly.
It's damaging to bring those measures to the conversation about suicide. When you weigh a man's life to decide whether or not he had a good reason to end it, it's not just unfair to him, it's unfair to everyone else who has dealt with similar suicidal thoughts or actions. It's not for you to say how difficult someone else's life is, especially from that great a distance, and your willingness to do so signals to everyone else the way you're looking at them, too. You're looking at them that exact same way -- you just haven't been called upon to issue your judgment yet and tell them if their life is worth keeping.
He didn't have an obvious reason to die, so for a moment there people had to struggle with the idea that he wanted to die anyway. I don't think I saw many people struggle successfully. I saw way too much relief when the autopsy news came out.
"Oh, I get it now."
"Oh, that's how sick he was."
"That's not really suicide when you think about it, not REALLY, that's only a step down from euthanasia."
But see, all that news did was let them understand the intent of suicide: to put an end to suffering. Uncurable sickness is a kind of suffering people sympathize with, are able to understand, in a different way than depression or mental illness. There is a greater understanding that the sickness is not your own doing, for one thing. It's not something you can rub dirt on and walk off. When we privilege physical sickness that way, we reinforce the idea that mental illness is somehow ... all in your mind. Somehow something that you could actually, really, secretly, just walk off if you really wanted to.
We reinforce the stigma of mental illness.
We reinforce the stigma of trauma, abuse, victimhood.
We reinforce the preference for polite silences.
I often talk about how the stigma of admitting to having been sexually abused -- the stigma to admitting to having been traumatized by such abuse -- reinforces the silence that pervades the culture, and helps to perpetuate a society that is safe for predators, a society in which it is easier to abuse children. The same is true for our treatment of mental illness. So long as people continue to treat any of these issues -- depression and mood disorders, personality disorders, impulse control, anger, self-loathing, the processing of trauma, addiction, anything -- as something you can just get over, something you have to just "really want" to overcome, we stigmatize and punish the people who are already suffering the most.
We bond so much over our migraines, trading stories of what triggers us and whether Gatorade or Excedrin does any good, or our seasonal allergies and isn't it so much worse this year than last year, but if we talk about our emotional problems, our mental illness, our blinkless nights studying the skin of the room, we're whining -- wallowing -- making it uncomfortable --
I'm not asking you to hold everybody's hand and listen uncritically to their every little complaint about the world and everything that's happened to them. I'm not asking you to indulge self-destructive behavior in the name of supporting people or to make no distinctions between depression and whining, depression and simple sadness.
I'm asking you to think differently about mental illness and grant it as much dignity as a histamine response.
Why do people kill themselves?
Because they didn't find a better solution.
Because they didn't stop hurting.
Because it was the one thing they could do.
Because it was something they could control.
Because the thought of a tomorrow is horrifying.
Because they are the one person they have the power to lash out at.
Because a walk around the block and a little me time wasn't enough.
Because you can do everything you're told you're supposed to do, and you still feel the same way, and now what?
Because we did not help enough.
Suicide Prevention Resource Center.
National Alliance on Mental Illness.
No comments:
Post a Comment