Robin Williams, Depression & Suicide

Hearts are heavy with the news of the suicide of Robin Williams at the age of 63.  With seemingly so much to live for, why would this comedian and actor who brought joy and laughter to millions "choose" death at his own hand?  Why did he "choose" death at all?

Robin Williams is just one of over 30,000 persons in the U.S. who will successfully kill themselves this year.  It is ranked as the #10 killer in the nation (National Institute of Mental Health).  My own state, Montana, is number One in the nation for its suicide rate (Billings Gazette, 2012).

How does one get to the place where suicide is the only viable option?  I would like to talk about my own battle with depression  and suicide.  Because we are all individuals, with different lives and experiences, my depression is most likely as unique as I am.  But having read about depression and talked to others who have struggled with it, there are definite commonalities that occur through all ages, genders, races.

I have struggled with depression since adolescence.  Thoughts of worthlessness and hopelessness were the fallback to someone who felt so different from others (who doesn't, in adolescence).  Topped with divorcing parents and living in a family where hidden incest was part of the weave made the challenges of adolescence seem even more insurmountable.  Though I flirted with thoughts of suicide, it was never a genuine option until my struggles with it much later in life.

In 1993, I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia.  As part of the treatment, I was placed on non-therapeutic levels of an anti-depressant to regulate my sleep, a common intervention for Fibromyalgia.  Because many anti-depressants have side effects that include sleepiness, dizziness, lack of libido, weight gain, I tried quite a few until I settled on one with the fewest side effects.  In 2000, my husband and I walked the Honolulu marathon.  After 6 months of training I was in the best shape of my life.  I felt good.  Because of ongoing problems with libido, I decided, on my own, without physician consultation to stop my anti-depressant.  I did not know that if you don't taper going off of most anti-depressants, you risk falling into clinical depression.  I stopped the Zoloft in December.  By January of 2001, I was in the deepest depression of my life.  I will attempt to describe what it felt like and why suicide seemed inevitable.

Despair.  In the Catholic church, despair is considered a sin.  But despair is not a choice, it just is.  The minutiae of living is a challenge, even for well-adapted, optimistic persons.  For someone locked in despair, living is unbearable, a burden of mammoth proportions.  Everything is heavy, every breath is hard, every step a movement through quicksand with shoes of concrete.  For me, I lost all emotion.  There was no joy, no laughter, I was past the point of tears.  My face felt plastic and emotionless.  It was all I could do to get words past lips that were frozen.  My thinking was disordered.  The simplest daily task was an insurmountable obstacle.  Movements were automatic.   All sensations were muffled or smothered.  And the complete and utter exhaustion.  There was no energy for living, no energy for life.

It is at this time, in complete despair, with no will to live, with no way to get out of the depression, I think suicide becomes almost more of an inevitability than a choice.  That only 15% of people with depression successfully commit suicide I think is a miraculous number.  When you can't move, you can't think, you can't feel, you can't love or feel love, going on with life is impossible, a burden that can't be carried.  You feel unworthy of life and a burden to those around you.

I remember walking along our hiking trail along the river here in town.  I could see the sun was shining, but I couldn't feel it.  I could see myself walking down the banks and into the river, having this unbearable burden lifted from me, a reprieve.  Or driving along the steep cliffs, thinking just one turn of the wheel, was all it would take to become airborne and crash into the river.  I knew that it was wrong, but that solution was something I could do in a situation where willing myself happy was impossible.  Life was too heavy to be borne.  I couldn't get back to me. 

 Fortunately, I did not have the courage and sense of resolve necessary to overcome my fear of death.  Perhaps it takes courage in equal measure to either seek death or to seek life.   At the time my kids were ten and six.  They connected me to life that I didn't let go.  Instead I called the lady who is still my physician.  She got me in THAT DAY, and started me on an anti-depressant and got me into therapy.  Without two small children bringing me back, I would have let go of life.

I can understand someone like Susan Smith who in October of 1994, was so depressed she wanted to kill herself.  But loved her children too much to leave them behind.  She buckled her two children into their car seats and drove into a nearby lake.  Unfortunately, her realization that suicide was not the solution, did not  occur to her until it was too late to save her children.  

Here in Montana, just one block over, a prominent lawyer killed his wife and two toddler children before turning the gun on himself.  People were shocked.  My own husband condemned that as an act of a coward, all suicides as acts of cowardice.  Anyone that can say that has never gone head to head with true despair.  Being so deep, you can't think straight, make good choices.  Suicide seems the only solution.  Perhaps killing your own family is a protective act, so they don't have the pain of living without you.  Again, I must repeat, when you are at the bottom it is very hard to make good, thoughtful choices.  Your only thought is "this must end."

This is my own story.  There are thousands of different stories, with different triggers, but the one constant in deep depression and despair is "this must end."  And so, Robin Williams ended it, his torture too deep, his sorrow so unrelenting, that he couldn't fight for his life.  Given his lifelong battle with alcohol and cocaine, I would not be surprised if we hear in the days to come that that wonderful man was using these substances to self-treat bi-polar disorder.  His wonderful bigger than life persona could very well be his state of mania.  With bi-polar disorder, depression is even deeper and more oppressive because you have fallen from such joy.

So what are the signs of depression so deep it could lead to suicide?  From www.save.org they are:

Warning Signs of Suicide

These signs may mean someone is at risk for suicide. Risk is greater if a behavior is new or has increased and if it seems related to a painful event, loss or change.

• Talking about wanting to die or to kill oneself.
• Looking for a way to kill oneself, such as searching online or buying a gun.
• Talking about feeling hopeless or having no reason to live.
• Talking about feeling trapped or in unbearable pain.
• Talking about being a burden to others.
• Increasing the use of alcohol or drugs.
• Acting anxious or agitated; behaving recklessly.
• Sleeping too little or too much.
• Withdrawn or feeling isolated.
• Showing rage or talking about seeking revenge.
• Displaying extreme mood swings.

Additional Warning Signs of Suicide

• Preoccupation with death.
• Suddenly happier, calmer.
• Loss of interest in things one cares about.
• Visiting or calling people to say goodbye.
• Making arrangements; setting one's affairs in order.
• Giving things away, such as prized possessions

If someone you love is battling depression and its deadly partner suicide, all the love and listening in the world will not save them.  It is in the chemistry of the brain.  If they are showing any of the above signs, don't wait, take them to the Doctor, to the ER, drag them kicking and screaming if you have to.  Better to have a false alarm than a regretful death  If a nurse is told that the patient is suicidal, all doctors will give you a same day appointment. Only medication supplemented with therapy can save them.    Eighty percent of people who seek treatment are successfully treated.

Thank you for reading my story.  I hope it has resonated with you.  If you think this will help anyone, please share.

Namaste,

Kismet

Requiem

He died in the bathtub with the water running.  They found him, dead after his downstairs neighbor complained of water dripping from the ceiling.  The San Francisco police found my name in correspondence and called me far away in Montana.  It had been 46 years since my sister and I had seen him.

He was brilliant.  But he couldn't stick with anything.  Bounced out of the Coast Guard Academy, Ole Miss, where he met my mother.  He was passionate about peace and the equitable treatment of all peoples despite their color or economic disposition.  He spent 6 weeks in the Mississippi State Prison for arriving by train in Jackson, MS in an integrated black/white group during the Summer of Freedom.

But life became too taxing for him.  He became paranoid, delusional.  My mother became scared for our safety and divorced him in 1964.

I would receive random letters from him, forwarded by my grandparents, as our location was kept from him due to threats he made toward us when my mother remarried.  When I joined the Peace Corps, I started communicating with him directly.  I felt safe, a world away, in Africa.

His letters were rambling, filled with tales of street people, odd jobs he would perform for cigarettes.  He wrote of bands and clubs of the Indy Music Scene in San Francisco.  He would send random post cards, hand bills, stickers.

I maintained correspondence with him.  His letters followed me to Montana.  I had a child.  He called.  We would talk...he would ramble.  Real conversation unable to take hold in the slippery slope of his mind.  During the first Iraq war, his behavior escalated.  He would page me numerous times at the hospital where I worked, to say nothing, be agitated. I was contacted by security at Malmstrom Air Force Base.  They were on lockdown because he said that he had seen men in ski masks with machine guns in a van headed toward the base.  They were convinced he was there in Great Falls.  I did not think that was true.  The San Francisco Police established he was there, after arresting him for walking naked through his apartment complex.

One Christmas after I became sick, before I received disability, when money was in short supply, we received a huge box from him.  It was a cornucopia of thrift store odds and ends.  Chinese slippers, robes.  Drumsticks and  drum pad.  Hats, T-shirts.  A collection of coins from all over the world.  Flag scarves, imported cookies.   It was a treasure box in the eyes of my children.  I must admit, I opened it with much trepidation as to its contents.  But what a gift, with perfect timing.

After being evicted from several apartment complexes, living intermittently on the street, his Social Worker found him a new home, in a beautiful apartment complex located on the bay, just down the street from Giant Stadium.  His apartment was chock a block with stuff, porn magazines, a large screen TV, and multiple 2 cup Pyrex Measuring cups, grocery carts.  We found out the management was in the process of trying to evict him.  Erratic behavior, kitchen fires, grocery carts full of stuff.

The Memorial held at the Apartment Complex was packed.  People spoke of his intensity, his intelligence, his friendliness.  He spoke of his family as if we were not estranged.  He baked brownies and dispersed them in his multitude of pyrex cups.

The funeral was held in an Episcopal church with a thriving soup kitchen and service to the homeless.  There were 11 of us until someone from the soup kitchen wandered in and stayed.  And then there were 12.  "Come to me ye, who are burdened and heavy laden."

Strange Interlude

I am a ghost in skin.  I can't sleep at night. I can't wake during the days.  I wander through my house with little energy to choose and do.  I have forgotten how to breathe when I sleep and am now on a machine that does that for me.  I took myself off my medication for my borderline high blood pressure because my heart was trying to flutter itself out of my chest through my mouth.   Before my medication debacle I was riding my bike, walking.  Now, it seems to take all my energy to drift from bed to couch to porch to backyard.

I practice the piano that I have not touched since 2000.  Left and right hand struggle to work together.  Notations on the page must be translated to keys touched and pressed.  I must close doors to protect my husbands ears from the slow halting struggle.  But I persist, liking the stretch as that part of my brain is resurrected from its long, dusty slumber.

The first part of the summer was spent in joy in my garden.  New flowers blooming daily.  Weeds pulled, beds planted.  Hands in dirt, smell of growing, rich and musty filling my nostrils.  New bird feeders are hung, new bird houses with smaller holes to attract the more elusive wrens, black capped chickadees and house finches rather than the ubiquitous house sparrows.  We had four bird families hatch in our yard this summer.  One wren, three house sparrows.  We enjoyed the marvelous bubbling brook melody of the wren until her babies hatched and she warned everyone away with her buzzing rattlesnake call.  The wren was our favorite, tiny, she would posture and spread her wings in some ancient dance and freeze till our attention wandered away.

Now, during the hot days of August, we are waiting for the asters and chrysanthemums to bloom.  The sunflowers from random seeds planted by squirrels, falling from bird feeders, are blooming; those that have not been pruned by the squirrels, headless stalks stretching toward the sun.  The garden is on auto pilot now, perennials slowing down, even fewer weeds to be pulled.  The light is changing as the sun's arc inches back toward the southern horizon.  Daybreak is later, darkness earlier.  The smell of the earth hotter, dustier.

I long for the energy and desire to do more.  I want to feel the pull and stretch of muscles well worked, moving under my skin, breath coming fast, heart beating strong.  I struggle in my own body, I do not fit any more.  My feet swell, skin becoming shiny and plastic.  Steps painful.  I feel as if I am scaling cliffs when I walk on stairs, one slip away from careening down the slopes.  I need the rush of oxygen, the dance of blood through my veins. 

I avoid mirrors.  I don't recognize myself; the puffy eyes, pouches above my cheekbones, the face broadened like a bulldogs.  I have regained the weight I slowly shed over 9 months of exercising.  I long for the energy to return to that life-giving physical endeavor.  I count my chins, contemplate my rolls, fight contempt for my physical body.  I'm not into self-loathing, but it is hard with this imposter's body.

I go to a nutritionist, hoping for a simple meal plan of meals that I can eat.  I leave with even more supplements, more food restrictions.  She says she'll have me eating all foods in a year.  I will give it a month, and assess how I feel.  I ponder the money I am giving her for this gift of well-being.  But I am at an impasse, a place I don't want to be.  I wish to go up, scale the cliffs that seem now insurmountable.  I'm tired of me, of a brain befuddled by fatigue and pain.  I wish to LIVE not just survive.  So I swallow pills.  I struggle to cook my meals.

I want to want to do other things, go places.  I want to want to create; do my batik, my stained glass, dance, move.  But I struggle to move, to breathe, to live.

And most of all, I am tired of myself.  

Sad in the Mud

I am really struggling.  Because of my food intolerances, I am sleeping anywhere from 12 to 20 hours at a time, where I can't wake up.  When I do wake up, I am exhausted and foggy.  I do my best to avoid foods that I know will get me, but that seems to be changing so much, so quickly that I think it is more the combinations of foods.  This makes it almost impossible to anticipate which foods will "get" me.  My sleep is full of intense dreams and nightmares.  Yesterday, it was an infestation of insects which laid eggs inside my body.  I woke up screaming from that one, drenched in sweat.  My nights are switched with my days.  I can do little on the days that I wake up at 3:00 in the afternoon or later.  I have slept until 5:30 p.m. even when I have gone to sleep by 11:00 p.m.  I am afraid to go to sleep, for fear of dreams and the possibility that I WON'T wake up.  My rational mind knows that this is improbable.  The child in me is fearful.

And so, I sit...and read.  Resigned to not doing.  I have many blessings.  A husband that says he still loves me.  Amazing children who are young adults filled with idealism and the belief that they can change the world.  I have a home that I own.  I have friends, but time with them is sparse do to my inability to interact with them in my strange and twisted days.

And then there is the pit in my stomach.  In my attempts to help a friend who was going through a grueling divorce from an emotionally abusive husband, I helped her financially since she had no resources.  First the lawyers fees, then money to move, to catch up bills.  By the time I woke up to reality, I had given her $28,000.  All without my husband's knowledge or consent.  We had to refinance our home, and it was in this way that my husband found out.  So conflicted.  My friend needed help, but I put my family at risk.  At 55, I am paying off debt rather than investing in our retirement.  I have broken trust with my husband and my family.  I can't fall asleep at night because of the pit in my stomach.  I can't wake up because of my body.  I can't do, because of my illness.  And despite this huge breach in trust and giving of money that we don't have, my husband has forgiven me.  He still loves me.  I do not know if I could have done the same.

And then a phone call.  From someone I love and care for.  I have hurt her.  The pit grows larger.  It widens to impossible dimensions.  

And this blog.  It has become a form of self-expression, a release, a sharing of my passions, thoughts, ideas.  Is this self-indulgence, self-aggrandizement, a plea for attention?  Is this wrong?  I have gotten positive feedback from others who have gone through the same struggles.  Gratitude for putting into words their fears and experiences.

I am really at a low point.  I know, or hope or pray that I will rise up.  But this is not the life I had hoped for or chosen.  My husband and I have a phrase borrowed from a storybook about a pig that was "sad in the mud."  And so I sit, mud dripping from my nose, up to my hips in goo.  I hope that the mud will dry and not cement me in place.  I ask for forgiveness for those I have inadvertently hurt in my desires to express myself and help others.  Perhaps the rain will wash away my tears and fears.  I hope for the days when I am awake and truly alive.  I pray that I can do more than just "survive".  I know despair.  I battle it daily, even as I try to embrace life.  But it is messy, and fraught with mistakes.  I am more than human.  I am.

Namaste.

Kismet

Copyright March 2014

A Garden in Winter

My backyard faces south.  In Northern Climes, when the sun drops low in its circuit through the sky reaching its peak far from overhead like a backpack slung low on the back of a middle schooler, this is very important.  It means that this is the part of the yard that receives sun.  The snow which has been gracing us each week anywhere from 2" to 2 feet this winter, then melts in stripes, tracing the shadows of the trees and the buildings surrounding us.  Snow skirts my garden beds, flirting with the colors, much subdued during this, the season of rest.  Below ground things are happening.  Bulbs are sleeping and freezing; that much needed freeze that insures another year of blooms.  I, with my Southwest Desert upbringing, am in awe, each spring when the snow crocuses and hyacinths force their blooms from beneath striations of snow.  Life in a bed cluttered with the detritus of trees, dead brown leaves from the previous fall.

I look from my kitchen window and I see all my wind sculptures hurtling through stationary space.  Anchored to the frozen earth but engaged in their frenzied circuit around their axes, turned by the unrelenting southwest winds which breaks the bonds of the snowbanks with earth.  The crystals release their water ions into the air, lending water to the frozen earth.  I walk through the beds.  The smell is sharp, cold, metallic.  There are colors here, even in the death of winter.  The frozen oranges and yellows of ground cover  when moisture is burst from the cells of the leaves during our below zero snaps.  Despite this heavy-handed caress of nature, there are still expressions of green in the surroundings of yellow, orange and brown.  Something is still living in my garden.  It is my bachelor buttons.  Always constant despite the freezing breath of winter.  My bachelor buttons and choral bells are stagnant but very much alive.

I watch the head of a bird peek out from the newest birdhouse perched on the trunk of the ash that frames my perpetual garden of painted blooms on my garage.  He is roosting, waiting out winter in the dubious warmth of the wooden birdhouse with the license plate roof.  He is waiting for spring as am I and my garden.  My yard has been silent lately.  We saw a raptor sitting in the lower limbs of the Ash tree.  The squirrels and the birds must be hiding from him, as our offering of sunflower seeds from our own sunflowers are left to languish uneaten in the bird feeder.  Ignored for later days when it is safe to traverse my yard to settle winter's rumble in their tummies.

The sun is creeping back up the horizon, and now shines through my dining room window; a marker of longer days.  A glimpse of even longer days to come despite the chill of the air, and the metallic promise of more cold weather and snowstorms.  It is this sunlight that beckons me to my garden.  I smell the air, testing it for the smell of warmed earth.  I am too early for this sensation.  The sunlight fools me.  It makes me think that the burgeoning growth of spring is just around the corner.  In this, my 25th year in Montana, I know better.  I know not to plant new plants until late May at the earliest.  May, still months away.  But the perennials already planted, the primrose, the pasque flowers, the daffodils and tulips will jump the gun flirting with the frozen air and slowly warming breezes; will bloom in March or April.  These brave harbingers of growth, green and promise of longer days and scented air.

I step back into the warmth of my home, to watch my windmills spin away the days.  Longing for growth, for freedom, for life.  I watch.  I wait.

Sometimes I am an Escapee to Life

I am...dreaming?  Am I awake/living, asleep/dreaming?   I am running.  Talking to my father (deceased) and mother (divorced and remarried).  I am... asleep/dreaming.  My sleeping mind remembers an alarm clock set for 10:30 a.m.  It plays the radio; shuts off unattended by myself who is locked in dreaming sleep on the other side of the bed.  Slowly, slowly I surface.  Am I awake?  I am in bed.  I feel the pillows, the sheets, the bed.  I cannot yet open my eyes.  My mind moves from my active dreams reluctantly to my actual true life.  Me.  In bed.  Daylight comes in around the edges of the shades.  I hear my chimes which activate to sunlight.  Sunlight means daylight.  Another day.  Trapped in sleep.  My eyes are puffy from my nighttime intake of craisins and semi-sweet chocolate chips.  Yesterday I climbed from sleep at 4:30 pm.  I could not succumb to sleep until 4 a.m.  Nighttime is dangerous.  I am awake, but trying to calm myself into sleep.  I read.  I watch Netflix on my Kindle.  I play on-line Scrabble, word games.  And I eat the forbidden.  I cannot eat anything out of a box or package.  To do so is to subject myself to a day locked in sleep, in dreams that won't let go, in sleep that cannot be conquered, to awaken to a body stiff and to eyelids puffy and face looking like my 79 year old mother.  I, after all, am 55.

On the days I sleep and awaken late, I sit.  I read, but am tired of reading, I play, but am tired of playing.  I am too tired to do.  My creativity must have energy in order to capture itself in the breath of life.  I sit. I tire.  If it is a good day, I can cook myself a small meal.  I can wet my hair and put it up, drive myself to the gym.  There I exercise.  Sixteen minutes each on the recumbent bike, the ellipticycle, the rowing machine, the arm cycle.  I mingle without talking with other human beings.  Young, old, male, female, fat, fit.  I stretch.  I drink. In the sauna, are young and old.  I read my Kindle, hoping that it can take the heat.

On some days my exercise gives me energy.  On others, it takes energy.  I have lost 13-15 pounds.  Right now I am stuck between 181 and 182.  Back and forth for a month now.

So...no creativity.  Dreaming.  Sleeping.  Exercising.  It takes me hours to gather the energy to feed myself.  I am fine if I limit myself to whole foods.  If I succumb to chocolate, wheat, cheese or milk, I trap myself in another day of puffy sleeping/dreaming/not living.  A repetitive cycle, self-fulfilling nothing.

I remember...working fulltime.  Working with kids and their families.  Taking care of my family.  Eleven years past now.  One child half way through college, the other out on her own and training to solo walk the Pacific Crest Trail, 1500 miles, 5 months, 26 miles/day from Mexico to Canada.  You go, girl!  You are my strong and wonderful offspring, capable of so much more than I.

My dreams are better than real life now.  My friends and acquaintances silent or gone.  So many only through work. No more work, no more friends.  Some that hang on and will meet me, despite their busy work schedules for lunch.  Others are too busy and say so.  So quickly and easily you lose friends.  Talking with my sister about my hot flashes.  I am the big sister, she is the little.  She says that in talking with her girlfriends, we are late bloomers to menopause.  "Really?", I reply.  "I have no girlfriends, so I didn't know."  "I doubt that," says my sister.  Who would my girlfriends be?  Phone calls are hard.  I no longer work.  Where would these people come from?  When you sleep and exist indoors, people do not come knocking at your door asking what's wrong?  How can I help?  I have my husband, who works.  My children with their own lives.  My mother who is battling dementia and poor health in North Carolina.  Who are my "girlfriends"?  I have acquaintances only.  My "friends" on Facebook, thumbs up or absent.

This is my now.  This is my life.  Hopefully, tonight I eat the right things, and have the energy to live...or at least drive the van to the gym where people do not know that I am an Escapee to Life.