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.