Depression is a disease, and it should be treated like one
Ever since the news of actor-comedian Robin Williams’ death broke Monday afternoon, social media sites, as well as their mainstream big brothers, have been abuzz with glowing tributes to the beloved performer’s life and work. This is hardly a surprise; Williams, in addition to having been a multi-talented performer who delighted audiences around the world for decades, was also, by all accounts, a stellar human being who, in real life, was genuinely concerned with the well-being of his fellows.
But on the other side of the coin — the side almost no one ever saw — we have now learned that Williams, for all his comical genius and altruistic endeavors, struggled with the dark demons of depression, demons that ultimately drove him to suicide.
And while this second fact of Williams’ life — or more to the point, his death — has opened the door to a new dialogue about depression and its potentially fatal consequences — which is a good thing — it has also opened the door for several persons of note to opine on a subject they apparently know little, if anything, about.
First, we have Fox News anchor Shepard Smith, who only hours after Williams was found dead, mused: “… and yet, something inside you is so horrible or you’re such a coward or whatever the reason that you decide that you have to end it. Robin Williams, at 63, did that today,” Smith said during his breaking-news telecast.
Then we have Todd Bridges — best known for his portrayal of Willis on the late-‘70, early-’80s sitcom “Diff’rent Strokes” and his subsequent battles with substance abuse — who had this to say via Twitter:
“It (suicide) is a very selfish act you’re not thinking about your family your friends or your fans … You don’t think that my life has been hell and I’ve had so many ups and downs now. If I did that what am i showing my children. That when it gets tough that’s the way out No you gotta buckle down ask God to help you. That’s when prayer really comes into effect”
Both Smith and Bridges have since “clarified” their statements and apologized for any offense they may have given, which was probably appropriate. But I, for one, am glad they made their initial statements, for they are pitch-perfect examples of the astonishing level of misunderstanding that all-too-often accompanies any discussion of depression by people who have never truly experienced it.
“You gotta buckle down,” Bridges says.
Whenever a person suffering from severe depression commits suicide, he or she is “such a coward …” Smith adds.
Because everyone knows that when the going gets tough, the tough get going, and if you find you can’t quite do that, you’re clearly just not trying hard enough.
Well … if you’ve ever suffered from depression — real depression, not what the oldtimers where I grew up used to call “a bad case of the mulligrubs” — then you know that telling a depressed person to “buckle down” or to “pull yourself up” is a little bit like telling a patient in the grips of a heart attack that he should just quit having those old angina pains and put on a happy face. If you haven’t, then you really have no frame of reference from which to form an intelligent opinion. It’s not your fault, and I’m in no way trying to condescend to you. Depression is simply something that exists outside your sphere of experience, just like — based upon their comments, anyway — it may exist outside Shepard Smith’s and Todd Bridges’ spheres of experience.
So, as a person who has been there, who has experienced it, I’m going to try to explain what depression feels like, although it’s difficult, if not impossible, to put into words.
The best image I can come up with is it’s a little like being paralyzed at the bottom of a cold, black pit, only you’re still somehow walking around in the world. You feel nothing but pain, loneliness, apprehension, desolation, hopelessness, and the inescapable notion that you’re fundamentally worthless and always have been. There’s no tangible reason for feeling this way. When you think about your life objectively, it seems no better or worse than anyone else’s. And yet, from the bottom of the pit, the feeling is your only reality, and from that reality, there seems no escape.
If you can ever actually muster the courage to tell anyone how you feel, you find you really can’t. When you try to explain it, this enormous, endless blackness that’s so real in your heart and soul becomes something that sounds a little too much like whining, and you’re met with sympathetic and well-meaning, but uncomprehending platitudes — things like, “count your blessings,” or “you just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” or “God will never give you any more than you can bear” — platitudes that, worse than meaningless, become further indictments of your own worthlessness and inad- equacy because you find yourself completely unable put any of them into effect.
So most of the time, rather than subject yourself to all the helpful misunderstanding, you opt instead to become an actor in your own life, a stranger who lives in your skin and masquerades as the person you used to be. You smile when you’re supposed to smile and laugh when you’re supposed to laugh. You go to work and you do your job like a grinning automaton; you hug your friends and you tell your family that you love them. You suit up, and you show up, and then, when it’s all said and done for another day, your return to the pit you never truly left in the first place feeling alone, broken, and banished.
And if it gets really, really bad — as so often it does — you find that you can’t even manage the masquerade, so you just sit down inside wherever it is you call “home” like a corpse that still happens to have a pulse, and you just sit there and sit there and wait for more of nothing.
It hurts. It hurts more deeply than any physical pain I’ve ever experienced.
That’s one of the reasons it disturbs me so much when guys like Shepard Smith derisively dismiss suicides as “cowards.”
They’re not cowards. In many cases, they’re some of the bravest people who’ve ever walked the planet … not because they killed themselves, but because of everything they endured before that final act of hopeless desperation for which they’re likely to be most remembered.
I’m not glorifying suicide, and I’m certainly not advocating it as a solution. But I do understand the path that can lead people to that point.
Depression is real; it’s an illness, just like any other illness, and suicide is often the tragic and terminal outcome of this illness. To minimize it or to brand those who ultimately died of it as “cowards” does nothing to address the problem or offer hope to those who suffer from it. And there is hope. As I said, I’ve found myself at the bottom of that cold, black pit, but through medical treatment and doing a few pretty simple things, I was able to get myself out and keep myself out.
Depression isn’t a joke, and it isn’t just a temporary funk that everyone should be able to overcome through positive thinking and an optimistic attitude. It’s a disease. It’s time we started treating it like one.
(Jim Patterson is news editor of the News-Times. Email him at jpatterson@eldoradonews.com)