This blog post in in response to Henry Rollins’ article Fuck Suicide, which appeared in LA Weekly on Aug. 21, 2014
It will give you an indication as to my age when I tell you that Henry Rollins was a hero of mine. But no more. His article is arrogant, self-important, and ignorant. And I’m sorry parenthood, wealth, success or whatever it was, turned him into the opinionated narcissist he has become.
It staggers and appalls me that at the dawn of the 21st Century, educated, traveled, world-wise people with seemingly critical intellects cannot grasp the fact that mental illness – major depression, bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, in fact any psychotic disorder – is an illness. It makes no distinction between those with immense fortitude and the weak willed among us.
It pains me to realize that people I thought were intelligent and empathetic do not have the imagination to comprehend that the more mentally ill you become, the less rational choice you can bring to bear on your life.
Do you really believe that Robin Williams was selfish? Didn’t love his children quite enough to suck it up and stay on the planet? Really?
I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 28. I was fortunate to have a milder version of the disorder. I got help, I took my meds and did five years of three hours of therapy a week. I don’t fool myself that I was responsible, or had the moral fibre or the internal fortitude to be responsible. I was simply LUCKY ENOUGH NOT TO BE SO SICK I COULD NOT DO THAT.
I have lost people to major depressive illness, and this is what they thought: I am going to find the courage to take myself off this planet so I don’t poison the lives of the people around me. They were loved, and appreciated, and desired, and delusional.
People in the grip of major depression – especially very severe and chronic depression – aren’t making rational decisions. It’s not that they’re sad and should snap out of it, it’s not that if they only pulled their fucking socks up and sucked it up, they’d get through. It’s not that no one showed them that they were loved, or gave them good enough reasons to stick around.
Although complex and still not completely understood, at the core of depressive illness is a neurochemical problem in the brain. Yes, environment can have an impact, as can events. But it is not that a circumstance causes someone to commit suicide when they are depressed. It is that their ability to cope with that circumstance becomes severely impaired. At the root of it, is a chemical imbalance in the brain. In the same way that insulin can keep a diabetic alive, it will only work if other environmental factors don’t add to the problem.
At that stage of depression, you have no capacity to see the world with even a modicum of objectivity. You can’t wonder what other’s will feel if you commit suicide because the disease interferes with your ability to possess affect. You DON’T feel the way healthy people feel. You don’t feel sad. You feel dead. Or worse, you cannot FEEL.
And sadly, if the drugs don’t work well enough (not all anti-depressants work on everyone, the way all antibiotics don’t work on all bacteria), or someone has misdiagnosed you and is treating you with the wrong meds, or if you are so disoriented and alienated and delusional that you refuse help, there is a very good chance you will die.
We have to stop thinking that mental illness is different from physical illness. It is a disease of the brain the way cancer is a disease of the body. Some people manage to survive it, and some don’t.
We don’t question the morality, the humanity, the courage or the fortitude of a person who dies of cancer of the liver. We are glad for those who survive and we mourn the ones who succumb to the disease.
Please treat people with mental illnesses with the same respect. Some of us make it, and sadly, many of us don’t.
We have known that many mental problems are actually, at least in part, neurochemical or neurostructural illnesses for a long time. So why is it that we keep desperately trying to insist that it has something to do with our fortitude, our courage, our emotions? Why do people as intelligent and learned and with so much access to knowledge as Henry Rollins still insist on reading depression as some unfathomable moral conundrum instead of a disease, that can often be treated, but sometimes can’t?
I’m not sure, but here is my hypothesis: We want very much to believe that our mind and our ‘soul’ are ours and are one. We want desperately to believe in our own autonomy, and our ability to see the world objectively. If we cannot trust our minds to perceive reality correctly, where does that leave us? Who are we then? Do we have the independence, the individuality, the agency we want so desperately to believe we have?
Contemplating that sometimes the organism goes so wrong that we lose the thing we value most – we lose ourselves – is horrific. It attacks our understanding of what self means, what reality means, what cognition is, what being is. And this terrifies us so deeply, we insist that it must be impossible, that there must be a ‘rational’ explanation, that it is a matter of weakness vs courage or a matter of strength of feeling or human bonds. Anything not to contemplate that… we are complex systems that can go wrong. We have less problem accepting how they can go wrong when we can see the flaw – that big fucking tumour sticking out of the side of your neck, that’s your body gone wrong. But when it is something inside the brain, when it affects our very experience of reality, we often refuse to see it. We’ll tell ourselves any lie to avoid accepting that our system can fail us this way. And sometimes it fails us fatally.
And if you just cannot grasp this, the intelligent, kind thing to say is… you just don’t understand. Then go educate yourself. Start here.
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Postscript
Henry Rollins wrote an apology for the above linked article a day later. I’m glad he did. I’m glad he was big enough to apologize. I hope he’ll do more in the future. I hope he’ll join the side fighting to destigmatize mental illness and help fight ignorance with science.
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