My personal take on the Robin Williams situation and mental illness. Both personally and professionally, I have been alongside people who have debilitating depression and anxiety, including some with suicidal tendencies, some who made it through and some who didn’t. When you support a person who is suicidal, you are supporting them through incapacitating pain, loving them until they are able to love themselves, reaching into their darkest place to offer a glimmer of light, providing hope that their suffering can end in life instead of death. Just like my cancer patients who suffer tremendously, the degree of pain varies from person to person, and can be off the scale at times, and IT IS A REAL ILLNESS. UNLIKE my cancer patients, who are often embraced and supported by their loved ones, many people with mental illness will experience a retreat by loved ones. Some of this is due to caretaker burnout, and some of it is due to a generational belief system that causes us to turn away from something we seem to fear so much. I will add that it was only a few decades ago that those same fears caused us to turn away from people with cancer, and we couldn’t even say the word, whispering ‘the big C word’. Now we all scream, ‘cancer sucks!’ because so many cancer survivors live amongst us, and our society has appreciable awareness and education, with a declining stigma attached to that and so many other similar illnesses. Unfortunately, not so with mental illness. Who is susceptible to crippling depression and anxiety? People who are faced with trauma on a long term basis, like veterans, firefighters, police officers, nurses, social workers, animal rescuers, and other trauma situations. Then there are those who are long term burned out caretakers, such as Alzheimer’s families, Cancer families, etc. And of course, childhood abuse and neglect victims, domestic abuse victims, prolonged grief victims, etc, may all face life-threatening depression as well. Others also have fairly manageable psychiatric illness that causes them to have bouts of life-threatening depression, such as Mood Disorders. But like so many other illnesses, some will have a genetic predisposition, but it’s not a guarantee that you will, or won’t ever, experience debilitating depression or other types of similar illness. And no matter the source, some depression is life-threatening and requires emergent interventions and people cannot just snap themselves out of it, no more than they can snap themselves out of a heart attack! Severe depression is as much a medical illness as it is a psychiatric illness because it’s caused by a physiological imbalance of an organ. Period. So why am I writing about all this? Because those who know me, know this is a topic I am very passionate about both professionally and personally. Over the years I have reached out to sufferers who fear coming forward due to the stigma associated with illness such as depression, anxiety, and post traumatic stress. With the most recent loss of Robin Williams, despite all the supportive comments that I’ve read by so many caring people, I have also read and heard some alarming remarks, such as he committed a selfish act and just another addict who bit the dust. IMO, these are people who speak from a place of ignorance and denial, adolescent-like fools who feel they are infallible, and simpletons who speak from a sneering place of morality. These are the same people who use words like crazy and psycho who help perpetuate the stigma. Mental illness is a societal problem, and we all have a stake in this. So get over yourselves! My own belief is that Robin Williams did not kill himself. His severely distorted, severely fragile, severely depressed mind did. Robin Williams died of depression. As sad as his passing is for all of us, my biggest hope is that people will seize the moment and start educating themselves about what exactly mental illness is and is not, and how we can support people and their families who are trying to manage it. We can all play an active role in the fight against mental illness by casting the stones aside, including the lingo, and using our voices instead to speak up for those who suffer. Future generations are depending on us.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 02:50:16 +0000
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