posted on Aug, 13 2014 @ 12:18 AM
In no way meant to disparage the life or work of the man...
Robin Williams kills himself and now everyone (again) is an expert in celebrity psychopathology. I've seen three or four threads today (and
innumerable internet blogs) trying to explain why comedians battle depression, how fame and depression are linked, etc. etc. Ad nauseam.
You can apply all the psychoanalytic theories you want, but none of you actually
knew the man. You have no idea what was going on in his head.
You didn't live his life. You didn't fight his battles. You didn't lose his loves. People like to put human behavior into perfect,
scientifically-classified boxes, when the subjective nature of human experience makes that all but impossible.
People can't even begin to fathom why the man chose to end his own life—it's impossible to know—yet that doesn't stop my neighbor and his
second cousin from bolstering their intellectual egos by regurgitating some BS pop psychology nonsense they know nothing about.
He obviously hated life enough to want to end it and actually follow through. A man who had everything anyone could ever want, and it wasn't enough.
That's what the story should be about—the illusion of ego-gratification (fame) and wealth as sources of happiness.
Wait. Now
I'm doing it. Can't we let the man go respectfully? Do we really have to use his death as a platform for armchair behavioral
scientists to classify comedians as an “at-risk demographic” for suicide? Honor his life and his work by not making him a statistic.
One man's death is another man's chance to show how smart he is about it.