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.
Thank you.
Well said.
Depression is a chronic illness, not a moral failing. Anyone who can’t have compassion for the dead is a fucktard*.
* If they can play medical expert, so can I. I now proclaim fucktardness as a condition caused by equal parts ignorance and arrogance
I was really sad to read that, my now once hero, Henry Rollins could say that about Robin Williams. I think some of us have been hammered with this motto that suicide is a very selfish act. Maybe, that was their way to keep us from actually doing it because we don’t want to think of the act as “selfish”. There is so much more to it than that. Mental illness is a disease and it’s the one disease always so conveniently pushed aside. It plagues both sides of my family and no one talks about it. I attempted suicide several times and I will say the last thing that crossed my mind was, “wow, I’m being really selfish right now”. The pain is too much to bear and you want to see an end to the years of trying too fucking hard to survive. I’m certainly glad I failed at my attempts. I wish someone/anyone would have just told me, “it will get better”. At least in my case, it did get better. There were issues I had to work out on my own, since I personally could not get benefits from therapy and I am sure I had shitty therapists. It was years of working out things, accepting things and moving on from things. Everyone is so very different and probably that’s what makes dealing with mental disease difficult. One kind treatment is not going to work for everyone.
I think suicide can be a selfish act, or a noble act, or a courageous act, or an act of immense bravery and compassion. It depends on the circumstance and the cultural reading of suicide. It was an honourable act in Japan for centuries, in Ancient Greece and Rome. The point is that our attitude to death in general and suicide in particular in our cultural is a negative one, heavily informed by a belief that you do not own yourself – god does.
However, there is no dispute about the fact that depression is a mental illness, and it skews our perceptions of reality. Like any illness, it can be terminal. When you die of cancer, your own cells have turned against you. When you kill yourself, suffering from major depression or any other psychosis, your mind turns against you.
Well said.
I have been battling with depression for 30 years, undiagnosed for a long time, and so bad as to leave me unable to function. Your article has expressed everything that I would want to say if I were to write on the subject and the reaction of some people to the tragedy of Robin Williams’s suicide. Thank you RG.
Thank you.
Eloquent. Accurate. Awesome.
I seldom comment on your posts; I seldom have words to add to your expertly-crafted writing.
Here, though, I feel I should add my barely-audible voice to those who are speaking up to say:
You are not alone.
Rollins has written an apology.
http://henryrollins.com/news/detail/an_apology/
And there will be another post from in Monday’s LA Weekly.
Well said, indeed.
I saw this article a couple of days ago; from long habit, once I read some rubbish statement, I discard any article and go onto the next one. After reading your blog, I did read Rollins to the end. And I agree wholeheartedly with what you say. Sadly, there still is so much ‘stigma’ and ‘shame’ around mental illness, yet it is remarkably common—men have something like a 1:10 chance and women a 1:4 chance of experiencing it in their lifetimes.
Suicide used to be a criminal offense in the UK, thus people still say that someone ‘commits’ suicide; such language is surely outdated. Yet these religious and legal concepts persist; we talk of ‘assisted suicide’ if people go to Dignitas in Zürich, rather than ‘felo de se’ which is often (not exclusively) taken to mean the taking of one’s life when sane.
Rollins could consider post-natal depression; how is it that a healthy, young woman becomes so depressed that she could kill her newborn child? Even the law (in the UK) is here compassionate.
As for help, there is plenty available in the UK; the Rev Chad Varah’s Samaritans (08457 90 90 90) were the first, but there are others now, not just for sufferers but also for their families.
Thanks for your response, Doctor K. And thanks for posting the number for the Samaritans.
I read Rollins’s piece and to be honest it’s a sad indictment of the chasm which still exists in some minds between physical and mental illness.
It makes me think of a time I saw a patient from a hospital here walking towards a church and passing the university on the way. He was stopping every few paces, clearly in some form of trance, bending down and kissing the ground. Students stepped around him with a snigger and continued on their way, lots of students. It makes me wonder if it was someone with a physical injury would they have responded in the same way. If it was someone with a broken leg or with an IV would they have found that funny? I was raised in a family which has had its fair share of experience with mental illness and I was shocked and appalled and in retrospect I was also grateful for my experience which had made me more understanding.
Rollins clearly feels that despite not understanding mental illness he is in a position to judge it – very sad from someone who is a public figure. He has since issued an apology, one hopes he would have done so on the basis of reflection and empathy alone and not just because of public outcry. How dare he judge someone he knows nothing about and their illness.
There is a very relevant opinion piece in this week’s New Scientist about ‘copycat’ deaths after sensationalist reporting of celebrity suicides. The WHO has recommendations about the media coverage of such suicides, urging particular caution:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26061-will-death-of-robin-williams-herald-spike-in-suicides.html?full=true#.U_kOX0hgw7A
BTW, The US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is: 1 800 273 8255
I believe Mr Rollins article was a common reaction to the tragic event, anger. Yes, when we are close to a situation we work through many emotions such as anger, frustration, dismay. When dealing with the mental suffering of a loved one, one of the first reactions is “Whats wrong with you? Snap out of it!” Its only by time and experience can one truly begin to grasp mental illness. Has Mr Rollins looked into the eyes of a beloved sibling and found years of schizophrenic delusions? Has Mr Rollins experienced the abandonment of a parent? Has Mr Rollins spent discomforting time visiting a loved one in a psychiatric ward time after time? Has Mr Rollins discovered there is no cure, only management? Despite Mr Rollins words, perhaps this is truly his first taste of the confusion, frustration, and anger when it hits home.
I also read Mr Rollins apology, is it genuine? I hope so…compassion, empathy, and love go a long way when dealing with mental illness because mental illness is real.
Thank you for this. As a mother of an autistic son (low in the autism spectrum) suffering from severe depression and my constant concerns about him, it’s important for me that people understand how a mental illness affects the person but also the people around him. I see him suffer, am constantly afraid he might commit suicide. I tell myself he doesn’t have the guts to do it, full well knowing that he might come to a point where he doesn’t even know what he is doing, where he sees no way out. He suffers immensely and with him suffering, I do. His mood is what determines the mood in the house, or rather, my mood. We are going through an especially bad time at this moment. Outside help has been asked for, for us as parents because we don’t know how to help him anymore. There should be more understanding all around for mental illness and the impact it has.
Marie
I suggest a word which may cover this & which should be used much more. This word is “ultracrepidarianism” which means “the habit of giving opinions & advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence”. Once you have a word, it makes so much more sense of the world, doesn’t it?
Yes, it does. And I realize it is more than just a matter of ignorance. It is also fear.
Exactly.
Fear.
In precisely the same way that some people—many more than we might wish to admit—consciously or subconsciously attempt to distance themselves from those with terminal physical illnesses, some (many more, I expect) do precisely the same thing with those suffering from mental illness. In many ways, such illness is far more terrifying to them than a physical one. With unseen and misunderstood causes and bewilderingly complex and unpredictable effects, it is the emotional and psychological equivalent of leprosy to many in our ‘enlightened’ 21st century world.
Though I am not familiar with Mr. Rollins, I take his apology at face value (even granting him the somewhat self-pitying—and self-serving—final para). Suffering oneself from a psychological/mental affliction in no wise lessens the dread that one may feel when forced to confront it in others. It may in fact even accentuate it.
I wish Mr. Rollins well on his journey, as I do all of us struggling to understand and come to terms with what makes us the way we are. Namaste.
e`a
Thank you for this. As a person with bipolar disorder and intractable depressive periods, my thoughts, feelings and experiences are so much as you describe that it truly made me feel, probably for the first time in my 45 years of life, that someone “gets it.” Really gets it. Rather than run on, I’ll just “ditto” those who have given you their thanks and appreciation.
The combination of his two articles and yours have taken up residence within my mind for the foreseeable future.
There are points I agree with, and ones I don’t… and while for some, education is the answer- for me it is introspection into my own battles with mental disease.
Does anyone have the ‘right’ response to suicide and depression? I think in our own reactions we will find the struggle people like Robin faced on sometimes a daily basis.
I still love your work, Henry’s, and Robin’s; but for now I believe I will forward all three articles to some friends that could use a connection to what they cannot admit is going on.
Your piece really helped me process my partner’s death, all of it, the tone, the words, the energy. I love this line “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?” And now, just as depression is such a mystery to me, so is grief, as I am now learning. Grief is ultimately an uncanny task performed by the body as well as the mind, and it can send the human system into chaos and shutdown as a way of dealing with the impact. Thank you.
Huge hugs.
What came to me forcefully the other day is this : a clinical depression makes your brain feel sadness as agony, contentment as misery, happiness as numbness, and elation as a fleeting chuckle.
And Death becomes Merciful, for you, then.
Because your medical problem has turned your dial to minus three. When it ought to only go to zero.
That’s not reason to get angry. That’s reason to weep in empathy.
xx