Family Member Committed Suicide Will Go to Heaven
I didn't know Robin Williams personally, only learning of his suicide opened an one-time wound.
In 1975, when I was 21 and my female parent was 51, she took her life. She started her car in an enclosed garage and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
In the The states, nigh twoscore,000 people commit suicide each year. More than than xc percentage of those who commit suicide suffer from a serious mental affliction prior to their deaths. My mother had been diagnosed with manic low, at present known equally bipolar disorder. She'd been medicated, treated with electro-shock therapy, and hospitalized dozens of times. Knowing her diagnosis and watching her struggle with the demons of her mental disease for shut to 10 years helped me cope with her death, enabling me to understand why she felt she had no alternative other than killing herself.
Like my mother, Robin Williams felt a desperate need to die. He hanged himself subsequently having stabbed his left wrist with a pocketknife. Though he'd been vocal nearly his cocaine-induced hallucinations and his alcoholism, he never publicly said he'd been diagnosed or treated for a serious mental illness. In fact, he went out of his way to brand us believe that he did not suffer from mental illness. In a 2006 National Public Radio interview with Terry Gross, Williams insisted he was not manic depressive. "I'm non that. Do I perform sometimes in a manic manner? Aye. Am I manic all the time? No. Practice I get sad? Oh yes. Does it hitting me hard? Oh yes."
Many psychologists, however, take speculated that Williams had bipolar disorder. Co-ordinate to the National Institute of Mental Health, 5.7 million American adults suffer from bipolar disorder, an disease characterized by wide mood swings. A person with bipolar disorder may experience the highest of highs alternate with the everyman of lows. These manic and depressive episodes can last anywhere from a few hours to months.
Manic episodes are characterized by feelings of bliss and high free energy. People often have racing thoughts and are unable to slumber or even sit notwithstanding. During a depressive episode, a person experiences extreme sadness. They often experience helpless or hopeless, unable to take pleasure from activities they had enjoyed.
In an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer just before the 1989 release of "Dead Poets Society," Williams talked well-nigh his struggle to "merits some inner quiet, to at-home all the business buzzing in my head."
"Yeah, I take to close down, literally to that indicate of really turning it all down to basically white dissonance," he explained. "Sometimes, it'south like a bad game of 'Pong' — the stuff bouncing effectually. And then when y'all detect what's billowy around, it'due south ordinarily old stuff... Information technology bothers me deeply. That'south when yous've got to clear information technology out, flush, and go along once again."
According to his publicist, Robin Williams had been contesting severe depression and had spent time in a rehabilitation facility last month.
Why was Williams so willing to talk about his substance abuse addictions merely not his mental health?
Perhaps he, like many people with mental affliction, feared its stigma. Perhaps he worried that he would be castigated and relegated to the sidelines.
Similar many, my initial thoughts upon hearing of Williams' death were of the many engaging characters he played on tv set (Mork) and in movies (Mrs. Doubtfire, the psychologist in "Good Will Hunting," and the English instructor in "Dead Poets Society," to name just a few) and the synapse-snapping comic genius he was. An advertizing-libber whose train of thought went lightning-quick before derailing into sublime lunacy touched every element of the human spirit and made u.s. laugh.
Simply then my thoughts turned to the family members Robin Williams left behind — his wife and his three children, who surely share her pain.
There are many ways for 1 person to leave another's life. Suicide may exist the nigh painful way for those left backside.
I retrieve the day my female parent killed herself. I was a senior in higher, studying for my last exams. When my begetter knocked on my flat door and told me of my mother's death, the hurting seared. That day inverse my life forever. For months, I walked effectually in a fog. For nearly 40 years, I've wished she could have envisioned an alternative to death.
Once the media hoopla dies down, Williams' married woman and children, each of whom lost a piece of himself or herself, will be left alone to make sense of his death. Merely suicide is a scar that doesn't heal. It removes one person'due south pain, but for survivors, grief, guilt and utter sadness linger. Moreover, a number of studies have institute that children exposed to parental suicide are themselves at increased gamble of suicide and melancholia disorders.
Whether Williams suffered from bipolar disorder, major low, or something else, his wife and children need to understand that the pain he suffered was and then bully he saw no culling to death. Hopefully he is at peace. But now they have to effigy out how to continue without him. I know information technology won't be easy.
Last week, his daughter, Zelda, paid tribute to her father on social media quoting "The Little Prince" and saying, "I love yous. I miss you lot. I'll endeavour to keep looking up."
My thoughts and best wishes are with his family.
This blog mail service was originally published as an op-ed slice in Chicago Tribune on August fifteen, 2014.
Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/all-in-the-family/201408/when-family-member-commits-suicide
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