reposted w/o perm
Suicide, a Crime of Loneliness
Robin Williams, September 14, 1978.
Credit Photograph by Jim Britt/Getty
Every forty seconds, someone commits
suicide. In the United States, it is the tenth most common cause of death in
people over ten years of age, far more common than death by homicide or
aneurysm or AIDS. Nearly half a million Americans are taken to the hospital
every year because of suicide attempts. One in five people with major
depression will make such an attempt; there are approximately sixteen
non-lethal attempts for every lethal one. The rate of suicide is going up,
especially among middle-aged men. These statistics get dragged out over and
over again, but they bear the endless repetition. Suicide may be a permanent
solution to a temporary problem, but it is one that beckons with burgeoning
seductiveness.
We lionized Robin Williams for the
manic gleam in his performances; at his best, he was not only hilarious but
also enchantingly frenzied. There are very few people who have that kind of
wild energy who don’t dip the other way sometimes. It often seems as if
those who are most exuberant experience despair in proportion to their
joy; they seem to swing wildly about the neutral average. Not always:
some people are like Bill Clinton, who appears to have sustained a level of
hyper-engagement that never lapses into withdrawal or dysfunction. But not very
many.
Robin Williams made no secret of his
troubled moods. In a profile
of the actor published in the Guardian, in 2010, Decca Aitkenhead
wrote:
His bearing is intensely Zen and
almost mournful, and when he’s not putting on voices he speaks in a low,
tremulous baritone—as if on the verge of tears—that would work very well if he
were delivering a funeral eulogy. He seems gentle and kind—even tender—but the
overwhelming impression is one of sadness.
She asked Williams whether he was
getting happier, and he said, “I think so. And not afraid to be unhappy. That’s
O.K., too. And then you can be like, all is good. And that is the thing, that
is the gift.” Aitkenhead saw this as sentimental, but in grim retrospect it
points to someone who struggled against his fear of his own sorrow, someone who
was afraid, perhaps, because he understood the potential that unhappiness had
to subsume everything else about him.
When the mass media report suicide
stories, they almost always provide a “reason,” which seems to bring logic to
the illogic of self-termination. Such rationalization is particularly common
when it comes to the suicides of celebrities, because the idea that someone
could be miserable despite great worldly success seems so unreasonable. Why
would a person with so much of what the rest of us want choose to end his life?
Since there are always things going awry in every life at every moment, the
explanation industry usually tells us that the person had a disastrous
marriage, or was a hopeless addict, or had just experienced a major career
disaster, or was under the influence of a cult.
But Robin Williams does not
seem to have had any of these problems. Yes, he fought addiction, but he had
been largely sober for quite a while. He was on his third marriage, but it
appeared to be a happy one, and he seems to have been close to his children.
His newest TV series was cancelled a few months ago, but his reputation as one
of the great performers of our time remained untarnished. So he would have had
little “reason” to commit suicide—as, indeed, most people who kill themselves
have little “reason” other than depression (unipolar or bipolar), which is at
the base of most suicide.
Nor is suicide an ultimate
manifestation of “selfishness” or “cowardice,” as the reason-mongers often
argue. Suicide is not a casual behavior; for all that it may entail
impulsivity, it is also a profound and momentous step for which many people
don’t have the force of will. At one level, the suicide of young people is obviously
more tragic than the suicide of older people; youths have more of life ahead of
them, more of a chance to work things out. At another level, middle-aged
suicide—the vanquishing of someone who has fought off the urge for decades—is
especially catastrophic.
It implies the defeated acknowledgment that if things
aren’t better by now, they won’t be getting better. Robin Williams’s suicide
was not the self-indulgent act of someone without enough fortitude to fight
back against his own demons; it was, rather, an act of despair committed by
someone who knew, rightly or wrongly, that such a fight could never be won.
Depression is a risk factor for
heart disease; open-heart surgery is a risk factor for depression. That’s an
unfortunate conundrum, and it will be hard to know what role Williams’s heart
surgery may have played in his escalating anguish. Alcohol is a depressant; it
depresses some negative feelings, which is why people use and abuse it, but it
can also make despair bottom out. It’s not yet known whether Williams had been
drinking immediately before his suicide, but he had done a recent stint at
Hazelden, in Minnesota, where he went in order to “fine-tune” his sobriety. So
if we are playing the game of looking for “reasons,” those are a few that offer
themselves.
The same qualities that drive a
person to brilliance may drive that person to suicide. Highly successful people
tend to be perfectionistic, constantly striving to meet impossible standards.
And celebrities tend to be hungry for love, for the adoration of audiences. No
perfectionist has ever met his own benchmarks, and no one so famished for
admiration has ever received enough of it.
That untrammelled dynamism that
Williams brought to almost every role he played has a questing urgency, as
though it were always in pursuit of some truth yet to be named. In public
appearances, he never showed the callous narcissism of many actors; his work
relied on the interplay between riotous extroversion and nuanced self-study. He
played an alien so well because he was an alien in his own mind, permanently
auditioning to be one of us. Suicide is a crime of loneliness, and adulated
people can be frighteningly alone. Intelligence does not help in these
circumstances; brilliance is almost always profoundly isolating.
Every suicide warrants mourning, but
the death of a figure such as Robin Williams makes larger ripples than most.
The disappearance of his infectious glee makes this planet a poorer place. And
since suicide is contagious,
others have perhaps made copycat attempts already, reasoning that if even Robin
Williams couldn’t make things work, they can’t, either. Waves of such events
have often followed high-profile suicides; in the period after Marilyn Monroe
took her own life, for example, suicide in the United States went up by twelve
per cent.
Williams’s suicide demonstrates that
none of us is immune. If you could be Robin Williams and still want to kill
yourself, then all of us are prone to the same terrifying vulnerability. Most
people imagine that resolving particular problems will make them happy. If only
one had more money, or love, or success, then life would feel manageable. It
can be devastating to realize the falseness of such tempered optimism. A great
hope gets crushed every time someone reminds us that happiness can be neither
assumed nor earned; that we are all prisoners of our own flawed brains; that
the ultimate aloneness in each of us is, finally, inviolable.
Andrew Solomon
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