EPTI don't want to make a blog solely about Robin Williams, he was an incredible man, and I could eulogize him for several pages just given the movies and the profundity of some of his scenes, but that is not what this blog is for.
A little while back several of my friends parents died, 3 to be exact. None of us are 20, and so those deaths came as shocks. 66% of them were suicides. These were loving parents, they weren't just out there and gone away. They were active in their childrens' lives, and both of which had lovely daughters who are incredible people that I'm glad I've gotten to meet and study in class with. And yet, despite having what most would consider, "it all," they both committed suicide. I'm not saying they were faultless or had perfectly unstressed lives, but they both had a loving wife, children, enough money to send their children to college and retire, along with successful careers; they had what many would consider exactly what the doctor ordered.
I don't like the fact that Robin Williams died. I don't think any did. His passing was not only tragic, but unforeseen despite having fought severe depression throughout his life, and that very detail is what bothers me so much. I've had depression, it comes back and its no fun, but what I have/had is nothing compared to what I see so many people deal with on a day to day basis. Thoughts of sadness, turned thoughts of self-harm, turned thoughts of suicide, turned into tragedy.
What I don't want is for what I'm seeing now, and actually liking, people talking about depression in a different manner, like it has now it home, to turn into a monster. I don't want people to focus on the fact that Williams killed himself. That is the antithesis to where this conversation should be going. I don't want the shock and awe of a household name going's to be the topic. I'm seeing this in more and more places too. We need to be talking about mental illness, we need to be more tuned into the psychological community rather than the stereotypical responses I see from people regarding illness. This isn't just about suicide. This isn't at all about suicide actually. This is about manic depression, the illness that guided Williams to tragedy.
What I don't want to see anymore of is people arguing about whether or not suicide is justified. We don't deserve a conversation of whether or not Seneca was right to say that suicide is justified when one's life has reached its finality - no we deserve much, much more. I'm sad that I'm not seeing it as much as I should be too. There are some syndicated websites making arguments, small scale people writing small scale articles, none with much "fuerza" behind them. All of them being shared, reshared, liked, and all without so much as a breakdown of how horribly flawed the points made in the are. What I want to see is a real delving of society into this problem.
But it saddens me that, not just days after this tragic passing of a man who touched so many lives, people have begun to get back on the train of arguing about other issues. Issues that don't touch most lives, stories of intangible topics that we can't control in ISIS or arguments pro or con concerning the recent riots. All of this in the face of a mental illness that touches all of our lives, because we all know someone with depression or another mental illness that I find, under most cases falls lowest on the rung of problems others consider to plague one's life and is simultaneously highest on one's own ladder of problems.
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