Insensitive Robin Williams Comments

[nausicaa]

Yes, the charming PP and his cohort, stupid and vile and I don't know which is worse.

God they are disgusting. This is why I try not to go over to the PP and Zsu threads, I don't think my blood pressure would withstand all of the stress that would be reaped upon it. Give me my penguins, green smoothies, and giant Bates' hair.

[Mama Mia]

I don't know how to bring this up without sounding like an anti- psychotropic medication nut job, and that is really, really REALLY not my intent. I whole heartedly support medication for depression and any other mental health condition where needed. I have family members who have been hugely helped by these medications.Okay? I am not anti medication and people getting all the help they can to feel better.

But, I know that Robin Williams had just come back a few weeks ago from residential treatment for relapse prevention ( or maybe a relapse? ) and depression. I am going to assume that while there they probably either started him on new medications, changed combinations of medications, or changed his dosage, if he was already on medication for depression. I haven't seen any consideration on- line that it could have been a medication reaction that caused him to have suicidal ideation - and act on it. It appears, from the way too much information press conference, that it was likely done impulsively, in a fit of despair. Increased suicidal risk is a possible side effect with pretty much every anti-depressant there is. So he may not have been in any condition to consider hope, or his family, or stopping to make a choice or anything else.

People die from medication reactions and interactions all the time -- this possibly could have been the case in this situation.

[Cheetah]

I don't know how to bring this up without sounding like an anti- psychotropic medication nut job, and that is really, really REALLY not my intent. I whole heartedly support medication for depression and any other mental health condition where needed. I have family members who have been hugely helped by these medications.Okay? I am not anti medication and people getting all the help they can to feel better.

But, I know that Robin Williams had just come back a few weeks ago from residential treatment for relapse prevention ( or maybe a relapse? ) and depression. I am going to assume that while there they probably either started him on new medications, changed combinations of medications, or changed his dosage, if he was already on medication for depression. I haven't seen any consideration on- line that it could have been a medication reaction that caused him to have suicidal ideation - and act on it. It appears, from the way too much information press conference, that it was likely done impulsively, in a fit of despair. Increased suicidal risk is a possible side effect with pretty much every anti-depressant there is. So he may not have been in any condition to consider hope, or his family, or stopping to make a choice or anything else.

People die from medication reactions and interactions all the time -- this possibly could have been the case in this situation.

Good point. I talked about my relative's situation in another post, but when he first got ill (manic phase), his first doc put him on one med and he stayed on that for a while, all the while getting increasingly depressed. He only really got better when he finally went off that particular med. I feel now that it made the situation worse, and might have been even the main factor in his suicidal ideations.

A Facebook friend also brought up the heart damage issue.. I guess she had a minor heart attack last year and some depressed mood following, and it seems that's a common side effect. I know when my father had a stroke they just automatically put him on antidepressants as it's so common to get depressed after stroke and I'm wondering now just how common it is with heart issues as well..

[Arete]

I just want to add my family's experience with suicide and the whole "selfish" aspect. I had a family member commit suicide. They did not leave a note. It blew a nuclear size crater into our family that is nowhere near being repaired. It destroyed his parent's marriage and his father is essentially committing suicide by preventable healthcare neglect.

Why? Because no note equals no answers, so people are left to blame themselves, Did I do/not do something that may have changed this course? Was there a clue I as a parent/sibling/cousin/aunt/uncle/friend missed that had I paid attention may have saved his life? There is no cancer to blame, there is no criminal to blame. There is despair, but what if you were an aggravating factor in that despair or depression? Which finally gets you to "That selfish bastard, why couldn't he at least have left an explanation so this GUILT could ease up?" There you have it. It's not pretty but unlike the fundie mental masturbation it comes from a place of both genuine love and pain. It's complicated when they leave you like that and you wonder to what extent you may have contributed.

[VixenToast]

You know, I've never really thought about how the friends/family members grief and guilt following suicide vs sudden would differ. Now I can see that had my dad, who died of asphyxia by pulmonary embolism, were to have hanged himself I would probably not be as healed as I am now, 11 years after after a world-shattering tween girl summer.

And oh I still feel pain and guilt. Pain because I wish I could have known him as an adult, and discussed historical events together (I have inherited his all-consuming passion and memory for history). Guilt because I came home from school and noticed dad wasn't right at all. Was talking and breathing funny. I asked him so many times if I should call 911 and he told me not to worry. But when my little sister came home she noticed it too. I feel too raw after RWs death right now to want to venture further down memory lane tonight.

I may have healed and moved on, but every now and again, usually in my moments of despair (I am bipolar-depressive), I am faced with the guilt that I should have just called 911 anyway. That he wouldn't be dead and I'd have him again. But then I remember he was sick from all his arthritis meds and the severe arthritis, and trust that death was a mercy to him.

A shout out to all those who have had to experience a suicide in their life. I took me a lot of healing, but I don't think I would be yet if my dad died from suicide instead.

Robin Williams, the man so full of life and energy, is now a man dead and silent. It is heartbreaking. After Dad died, my aunt showed me What Dreams May Come.... Now that Robin has died, I think I will watch it for the second time.

[ViolaSebastian]

I am finding all this extraordinarily difficult, as I'm coming up on the one year anniversary of having survived my own suicide attempt, one for which I was hospitalized for almost a month. It was kept quiet in my family and among my circle of friends, and only my mother (God bless her) and a very close friend who happens to work at the hospital at which I was resuscitated knows that it was a suicide attempt and not a "medication interaction." The things people are writing on facebook, particularly people that I thought of as good friends and good people, are staggeringly ignorant of the realities of Major Depressive Disorder and suicide and some of them, frankly, are just flat out mean. I'm particularly disgusted by the "you just need God/Jesus" crowd. No, what I need and needed is serotonin. More serotonin, in my brain. I have four generations of my family that are documented as suffering from this disease, among them my great-grandfather and grandmother, who are two of the most devout Anglicans I've ever met. They were wonderful people, they just got terrible numbers in the genetic lottery. Like I said, I'm having a tough time with all this, but fortunately I've been stabilized with an excellent new medication regime and I have a therapist I think of as a family member, and he and I are going to hash out my feelings on this tomorrow.

I think you made an excellent point about the medications, MamaMia, and the issue and reason for those warnings is because, very unfortunately, anti-depressants give you more energy before they take away your negative feelings and suicidal thoughts--so you still feel suicidal, but you have the energy and resolve to do something about it. I wouldn't be surprised if this came into play with Williams' case, and makes it all the more sad to me to think that he may well have been on the road to recovery at the time of his death.

[Rachel333]

This death and the ensuing conversation has been hitting me far more viscerally than I would have imagined. I have kept trying to write something, but I actually almost feel sick and until now have just had to close whatever page I was looking at.

"Suicide is selfish"... well no, and I can vouch for the fact that you really cannot think clearly or logically when it gets that bad. I felt like I would be doing the world a favor, and another woman I know felt that her death would leave her husband free to marry someone else who could be a better mother to her four kids. I look back now and practically marvel at how irrationally I was thinking, and I had no idea at the time. I really kind of hate who I was for a while. The memories feel like they were from someone else, and I wish that were actually the case.

At the same time, it took telling myself it would be selfish that made me remove suicide as an option. I decided that even if I were completely miserable for another 70-80 years, it would be better for that misery to stay with me, just one person, than for me to essentially transfer it to everyone close to me by my suicide and make more people miserable for the rest of their lives. I still wasn't thinking as rationally as I thought I was then, but it kept me going until I realized there are other reasons to stay alive.

It just bothers me when people talk about mentally ill people like they have no real agency or responsibility for their actions. I find it somewhat personally offensive, actually. At my worst I really was not capable of thinking clearly, but now that I'm doing well it really would be irresponsible of me to let myself slip back to where I was. Even just a few days off one of my meds makes those suicidal thoughts start to come back, so I've got to be careful.

My dad has had nearly the same issues and thoughts all his life, but he believed(believes?) that mental illness was a spiritual issue and so did not pursue any treatment. He thinks the hard route is the right one and I do appreciate what he's had to go through, but honestly I think the more responsible thing to do would be to at least try to get treatment. Even as a kid I could tell when he wasn't doing well, and that was hard on all of us, especially my mother.

But I guess going back to whether it is selfish or not, this quote from David Foster Wallace has been going around and I think it is by far the best metaphor for suicide I have seen:

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. Yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

[RachelB]

I am finding all this extraordinarily difficult, as I'm coming up on the one year anniversary of having survived my own suicide attempt, one for which I was hospitalized for almost a month. It was kept quiet in my family and among my circle of friends, and only my mother (God bless her) and a very close friend who happens to work at the hospital at which I was resuscitated knows that it was a suicide attempt and not a "medication interaction." The things people are writing on facebook, particularly people that I thought of as good friends and good people, are staggeringly ignorant of the realities of Major Depressive Disorder and suicide and some of them, frankly, are just flat out mean. I'm particularly disgusted by the "you just need God/Jesus" crowd. No, what I need and needed is serotonin. More serotonin, in my brain. I have four generations of my family that are documented as suffering from this disease, among them my great-grandfather and grandmother, who are two of the most devout Anglicans I've ever met. They were wonderful people, they just got terrible numbers in the genetic lottery. Like I said, I'm having a tough time with all this, but fortunately I've been stabilized with an excellent new medication regime and I have a therapist I think of as a family member, and he and I are going to hash out my feelings on this tomorrow.

I think you made an excellent point about the medications, MamaMia, and the issue and reason for those warnings is because, very unfortunately, anti-depressants give you more energy before they take away your negative feelings and suicidal thoughts--so you still feel suicidal, but you have the energy and resolve to do something about it. I wouldn't be surprised if this came into play with Williams' case, and makes it all the more sad to me to think that he may well have been on the road to recovery at the time of his death.

Sending thoughts your way, ViolaSebastian.

[Mecca]

I know this is not a very nice thing to say, but PP needs a good slap in the face -- that disgusting POS.

In what world does PP live in that he believes he can carry on the way he does and make it into heaven while a man, like Robin Williams, that has proven time and time again to be a giving and generous person would burn in hell? I would never worship a deity that would allow PP to inherent the kingdom of heaven while letting a person like Robin burn in hell. That is some messed up logic right there.

[Mitz_]

Remember those bumper stickers that said " what would Jesus do?" Religion used to be about your "personal relationship with God". It was all about love and goodwill, I don't ever hear them saying that anymore. Do fundies like Steve Anderson really believe in all this hate spewing?

Hey did you ever notice that autocorrect changes the spelling of "fundies" to " fun dies?"

[fun2beme]

People die from medication reactions and interactions all the time -- this possibly could have been the case in this situation.

A 29 year-old cousin of mine died suddenly in April due to a reaction from getting two cortisone shots one morning, and taking a Vicodin that evening as prescribed by her doctor. Know this is off topic but it immediately came to mind after reading your post.

[ILoveJellybeans]

Fuck you PP.

[apple1]

I know this is not a very nice thing to say, but PP needs a good slap in the face -- that disgusting POS.

In what world does PP live in that he believes he can carry on the way he does and make it into heaven while a man, like Robin Williams, that has proven time and time again to be a giving and generous person would burn in hell? I would never worship a deity that would allow PP to inherent the kingdom of heaven while letting a person like Robin burn in hell. That is some messed up logic right there.

Yes, he is very messed up (that wording is giving the benefit of the doubt). He might need to check into his own "heart".

"The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." That's in my copy of the KJV.

[Becket70]

Auto-eroticism my sweet patootie. I am certain that the theory of Ocham's Razor applies here, as it does in most things: the most obvious answer is the true answer (or words to that effect). Robin Williams suffered from overwhelming depression and he killed himself. All those alternate-reality scenarios out there are as ridiculous as the people doing the speculating. What is surprising me the most, though, is my profound sadness at his passing. I suppose it will let up but right now I am having a hard time coping with it. I'm glad that, for him, the pain is gone but his death sure left an enormous hole in our hearts.

[Firiel]

"Suicide is selfish"... well no, and I can vouch for the fact that you really cannot think clearly or logically when it gets that bad. I felt like I would be doing the world a favor, and another woman I know felt that her death would leave her husband free to marry someone else who could be a better mother to her four kids. I look back now and practically marvel at how irrationally I was thinking, and I had no idea at the time. I really kind of hate who I was for a while. The memories feel like they were from someone else, and I wish that were actually the case.

At the same time, it took telling myself it would be selfish that made me remove suicide as an option. I decided that even if I were completely miserable for another 70-80 years, it would be better for that misery to stay with me, just one person, than for me to essentially transfer it to everyone close to me by my suicide and make more people miserable for the rest of their lives. I still wasn't thinking as rationally as I thought I was then, but it kept me going until I realized there are other reasons to stay alive.

Same here, with the telling myself that suicide is selfish, although even when despairing, I hated the negative connotations of "selfish." Even when I thought that family and friends would be better off without me (and even didn't really particularly like me or care about me), I knew that having a daughter/sister/friend/spouse that committed suicide would be devastating, so I clung to that. Actually, when I was in high school, I told myself if I committed suicide, I would go to hell, even if I don't think I actually truly believed it. It kept me from considering it as a true option.

[MamaJunebug]

Rachel333,

I'm working from iPhone & unsure how to quote your post, but what you cited needs to be engraved on a wall at every Intersection if every road in USA - no, in the English reading world - if not the entire world!

That's it exactly, what that fellow wrote. Won't add in my opinions nor experiences. Simply - that's right, his explanation of it.

Humblest and long-abiding thanks.

[chaotic life]

BBC is reporting that his widow has released information that Williams was showing signs of early Parkinson's Disease.

Beyond that, I do not see it mentioned, and I believe it is only fair to the man and his legacy. RW was a life-long Episcopalian. There is no evidence he ever left his spiritual identification, and suicide does not strip you of that. It infuriates me that some so-called Christians are trying to trample on the genuine expression and a life lived within his faith and negate his own identification as a Christian. RW certainly did more in his life to demonstrate the righteousness of his faith than dimwits like Matt Walsh and PP will do in several of RW's lifetimes.

[salex]

One of the comments on PP's fb status: Auto Erotic Asphixiation trying to get a sexual rush by cutting off oxygen to the brain. His alcoholism destroyed his ability to control stupid compulsions. He had a heart valve replaced most likely due to the damage caused by lack of oxygen while masturbating. Nice huh ? Lets not celebrate him he was not a Christian.

Given that the press has never been shy about reporting Autoerotic Asphixiation as a cause of death in the past, and that particular thing doesn't tend to include cutting one's wrists, I thnk PP and his buds just get off talking about masturbation...

[Mama Mia]

I think the Parkinson's ads a whole other level of complexity, mentally, emotionally, physically and also medically. Some people aren't aware, but for some people Parkinson's also includes a huge component of cognitive and psychiatric symptoms. Given how brilliant and quick he was - I would imagine if he found himself having difficulty processing information it would be hugely distressing. I don't have Parkinson's, but a couple of my meds are also used for Parkinson's, and the list of possible side effects and interactions is pretty huge.

[chaotic life]

One of my grandfathers suffered from Parkinson's Disease for most of my childhood. I honestly don't remember him without it. I am told he adored children, and of all the adults in my life, he was the one who loved to get on the floor and play with kids. He built some of the coolest toys I played with as a child, and he had an irreplacable electric train set.

And 99.99% of my memories of my grandfather was of a man so depressed that all he did was sit in a chair and stare at the TV, walk to the front porch to smoke cigarettes and snap at children who bothered him. For him, depression was THE major component of his Parkinson's that I understood as a child. As an adult, I can remember the shaking, the hand rolling, and other classic symptoms. As a child, all I remember was that deep, dark hole that on a rare occasion my grandfather would come out of and do amazing things that no other adult could be bothered to do.

The very last years of his life, his doctor realized they had been treating his depression completely wrong for 20 years. They altered his depression meds and changed around his Parkinson's meds. The reason every memory I have of him is not depression is because those last couple of years, though his body was wracked by the disease, he had his mind back. In those years, he laughed, he teased, and he encouraged those around him. It was devestating when he died. We had only had a glimpse of the man my older sister had know and everyone had told us existed underneath that black cloud and then he was gone entirely.

I agree, depression is a HUGE symptom of Parkinson's, as is dementia. Parkinson's is horrible and the depression that comes with it, from my own experience, can be difficult to treat.

[Curious]

Awww Curious :(

As an epileptic, I was so fond of fluffy bunnies, but now ......*sob*, it's all over :(

It was more the addition of lawyers and to a lesser extent torture victims in with the others.

I'd think lawyers need a patron saint all their own, quite frankly ;)

[Curious]

PP on his facebook 2hrs ago:

The blasphemous, cross-dressing freak Robin Williams is in Hell! Quit idolizing the world's heroes!

facebook.com/sanderson1611?fref=ts

I'll happily go to hell if Robin Williams is there. I certainly don't want to be in a heaven that allows someone like PP in.

[Arete]

The tithing money must really be drying up at the Strip Mall. PP has been working overtime trying to get noticed with controversial statements.

Get a real job, loser.

[latraviata]

The tithing money must really be drying up at the Strip Mall. PP has been working overtime trying to get noticed with controversial statements.

Get a real job, loser.

Perhaps this will soften your heart.......

My wife and I had a wonderful 14th anniversary yesterday. Zsuzsanna is an amazing woman! She is beautiful, intelligent, an exceptional cook, and a great mother. But more than all the good qualities she brings to the table, the thing I appreciate the most is the depth and closeness of our relationship. We are still madly in love after all these years! The fire has not gone out!

.facebook.com/sanderson1611?fref=ts

[Walking Cat Bed]

I'll happily go to hell if Robin Williams is there. I certainly don't want to be in a heaven that allows someone like PP in.

I'm with Billy Joel. Let's laugh with the sinners. Robin Williams will keep us laughing.