RIP Robin Williams

Off Topic
161

[quote]countingbeans wrote:

[quote]LoRez wrote:

But getting back to the main point. A depressed brain is a dysfunctional brain. You simply cannot judge its actions the same.[/quote]

Fucking thank you.

This is why saying “no need for an open mind” in your best Urkel voice is just as dangerous as anything. [/quote]

Hmm, we are certainly crossing lines here. I am agreeing with you, but not on your terms, and that is causing a very hostile reaction from you. And I am saying exactly the same thing as LoRez is saying, but I didn’t get a big “Fucking Thank You”.

AND, I never argued that scientific and anecdotal knowledge of Depression is such that it is so completely understood that the only response needs be a rational response. I would say that our limited understanding of depression requires alternatives to straight rationalism. So in that respect we agree.

Now, please explain why I should keep an open mind about someone who commits suicide following years of depression being a coward? Because that’s what I’m definitely speaking out against. And really, I doubt you disagree with me.

162

[quote]magick wrote:
You seem to be saying that you don’t get why people feel for his death while they don’t feel anything for people who can be said to have done actual good.[/quote]

[quote]countingbeans wrote:
No, I “get” why people lament RW’s death, and I even said a couple times now it was perfectly fine [/quote]

Isn’t that the point you’re trying to make on this particular topic regarding Robin William’s death and how his fans seem to be devastated by it?

I apologize, but it would be helpful if you could explain to me what the major differences between that and

[quote]You seem to be saying that you don’t get why people feel for his death while they don’t feel anything for people who can be said to have done actual good.[/quote] are.

[quote]countingbeans wrote:

Yeah, I mean you are encapsulating my entire point in reference to that aspect of this discussion very perfectly and succinctly here.

And yes, I’m very much questioning the validity and acceptance of your statement by broader society. I may be wrong, but I’m certainly going to question in. [/quote]

I question it too. I understand why we do it, and I feel it’s pretty much inevitable. But I also believe that the entire point of being human is to rise above being human (if that makes any sense at all…), and so I don’t very much like the fact that we do this.

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[quote]Pigeonkak wrote:
Now, please explain why I should keep an open mind about someone who commits suicide following years of depression being a coward?
[/quote]

I’m not saying keep an open mind about whether or not you think the dead person is a coward. (Survivors who have that perspective as comfort aside.)

I’m saying keep an open mind about where the comment itself, stated by another, is coming from.

166

[quote]magick wrote:
I could “care less” that Robin Williams died. I don’t know him.

[/quote]

Read the thread, pretty much anything I’d want to say has already been said, so grammar Nazi time.

1:05

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[quote]countingbeans wrote:
The point is to communicate something to those reading it.

I’m glad you have it all figured out though, and this is all very obvious to you.[/quote]

I apologize for being quite rude here.

[quote]countingbeans wrote:
I was, very specifically and clearly speaking for myself. In fact that entire paragraph was explaining why I was engaging with smh in the first place and personal experiences with what I was saying.[/quote]

And here I apologize for using the wrong phrase. I do that sometimes. Generally I catch myself when gut feeling tells me “hey, that’s probably not the right phrase there”. Alas, I was sleepy and I suppose my gut feeling went to bed before my mind did.

What I meant to convey-

Please keep in mind that others generally are trying to do the very thing you wrote there.

[quote]countingbeans wrote:
Yet, you’re posting on the subject in apparent refutation to what I’m saying.[/quote]

No, I don’t know what’s going on because your posts, as far as I can tell, go like this-

One moment you’re talking as though you’re agreeing with people who say suicide is a sign of weakness/the ultimate selfish act/etc.

The next moment you’re talking about deeply personal feelings concerning suicide/depression and how your brain under depression doesn’t function anything like a normal brain and we can’t expect depressed people to act normally.

They seemed contradictory to me, and so made understanding your position on suicide and depression really hard.

Your response to Lorez’s post (which I agree with) and your response would probably have blown my mind if they existed when I wrote my response.

Though it might have been because I was sleepy, because I think I get it now.

[quote]countingbeans wrote:
hmmm, lol, you think?

To use your own words:

No shit?[/quote]

=)

[quote]countingbeans wrote:
Nope, not slighting me at all. I don’t read your tone as hostile and I certainly know smh isn’t slighting me.

The pride post is to make a point. And it isn’t for you or smh. The pride post is for anyone out there reading this that might for one second question that fighting the war isn’t the answer. The pride post is me letting someone, anyone know, that there are in fact people out there that believe in them, even more than they believe in themselves. And the fact that I’m some random e-person stranger to them makes it all the more important it be said.[/quote]

Fair enough.

[quote]countingbeans wrote:
I could list the e-people that have touched me personally, both good and bad from this forum, but I won’t. It would be quite lengthy and I would feel like a dick if I left anyone off.

I will say though that smh has, without question, helped me evaluate, change and sometimes reinforce because he is just as much of a stubborn bastard as I am, a lot of my perceptions and philosophies.

But let me ask you this, if it isn’t possible for smh to do such a thing, how is it possible for RW to have touched so many by playing pretend, by literally pretending to be someone he isn’t, for pay?[/quote]

You misunderstand, let me explain.

I see so many people rage over what others have said about them online, and it astounds me.

How do you let what others say about your qualities, which they cannot possibly get just from what is written online, anger you? They don’t know you; they only have tiny snippets and even those snippets probably don’t fully represent who you are.

Pushharder gave a nice little example for me to point to- See, I really don’t care what he thinks about me regarding what I wrote about my grandfather. He only has what I wrote to go by and I understand that it makes me look heartless. But I have no interest in going through my personal history beyond what I choose to write here.

If he wants to be judgmental about it, then more power to him. I’m pretty sure he’s wrong about whatever character qualities he attributes to me now though. There’s no way he can know my personal character based on the things that I wrote here, since I intentionally attempt to convey a different one here.

So, thus, by “touch personally” (or w.e. I wrote) I meant anger you or make you feel insulted or whatnot.

Certainly you can learn from what others write online. Certainly they can help you become a better person by making you look at your ideologies in a different light, etc. That’s not what I meant with “touch personally”.

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[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]csulli wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]magick wrote:

I know full well that my dad is everything he is because of what my grandfather did. My life as it is right now wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for my grandfather. And I truly believe he was a great man.

I still didn’t feel anything when he died. Because emotionally he didn’t mean much to me. I only knew him for a couple of years, and in those years he never once did anything with me.[/quote]

Maybe that says a whole lot about you that would’ve been better to have left unsaid.[/quote]
lol what?!? I don’t think he gave nearly enough details to make that call jeeze! I mean for all we know he saw his grandad like twice in those two years and he was like 7 years old when he died or something. That’s just the way it goes sometimes dude, you know that.[/quote]
Gather yourself, ratchet down the emotionalism for a bit and apply some logic to this situation.[/quote]
I feel like I’m the one doing that, not the other way around lol. The data is not present to make the claim that he’s got issues for not having any feelings about his grandfather dying. We don’t know his age, how many times he saw him, what went on at those times… We know next to nothing, certainly not enough to judge him for it. That’s applying the logic.

170

[quote]LoRez wrote:

[quote]dt79 wrote:

[quote]magick wrote:

[quote]dt79 wrote:
So such a person would be mentally incapacitated in a sense during the commision of the act?[/quote]

Possibly; I think that is what smh_23 is suggesting.[/quote]

Understood. Thanks.
[/quote]

I would suggest the same thing; that there’s a degree of mental incapacitation.

Certain parts of the brain cease to work as they do in a “normal” person, due to a number of factors, but some recent work has been showing that a depressed brain experiences a high degree of chronic inflammation. I realize “inflammation” is something of a buzzword these days, but even so, it basically boils down to “things don’t work the way they’re supposed to”.

From another angle, you’ve got concepts like “he acted in a fit of rage”, where the emotions overpowered ones ability to reason – most people have experienced this in varying degrees at some point in time. It’s not so much involuntary, as just “outside of conscious control”. Obviously most adults have learned to manage that, if not completely suppress that; something developed through maturity (compare a 2 year old to an 8 year old to a 15 year old to a 25 year old). But there can still be times where these emotional forces overcome reasoning.

The overpowering emotion in depression isn’t always sadness, and isn’t always a “fast” emotion like anger that quickly comes and is gone. It can be very slow and very strong. In some people, it manifests more as what looks like “laziness”… no longer wanting to do anything at all. The mind literally transforms your beliefs into thinking nothing matters and nothing is important. It’s laziness due to apathy, it’s apathy due to biological dysfunction. E.g., if I died tomorrow, so what?

Where it gets especially insidious, and this is why antidepressants have their black box warning regarding suicide, is when the two are combined. There’s two main competing thoughts: “I feel so horrible, I want this to just stop” and “I don’t have the energy to do anything about it”. The antidepressants address the second part in give some people the energy to act on the first.

But getting back to the main point. A depressed brain is a dysfunctional brain. You simply cannot judge its actions the same.[/quote]

Thanks for this. And this thread with Beans and others has been enlightening.

Culturally, depression as an incapacitating form of mental illness is pretty foreign to me, especially among the well-to-do, which is why the RW issue really hit home.

My first thought was to approach this from a position of emphathy, in which classifications like weak and selfish would be necessary to form a method to help one overcome such an illness. As opposed to something like schizophrenia, where emphathy would be impossible, and in fact, detrimental to decisions made in his welfare.

However, realising now that none of this is clear cut, i’ll have to learn more, perhaps speak to some doctor friends sometime soon.

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[quote]pushharder wrote:
If he’s in tears or overly or immensely depressed about a guy who recited scripts in front of a camera for a living who died and yet he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about his “great man” of a grandfather’s death MAYBE something’s out of kilter.
[/quote]

[quote]magick wrote:
Did I ever say I was touched by him?

I could “care less” that Robin Williams died. I don’t know him.[/quote]

Do I have to add you to my list of “people who cannot read” too?

172

[quote]pushharder wrote:
I’ll say it again one more time: if an actor “touched your life,” yes, you should be touched by his death. However, “touched” should not include immense depression. If it does, maybe it’s time to Get a Life.[/quote]

Immense depression were my words, and they were used in context like one would say “Requim for a Dream is an immensely depressing movie”.

And i also stated that despite an emotional attachment to the actor, the reason i was upset was also due to the fact that a person of his accomplishments and stature could somehow see life as not worth living. The reason being i have worked hard to come out of poverty to being fairly well-to-do but people in my family, being the reason i worked for, are still susceptible to being unhappy with life enough to want end it.

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[quote]MaazerSmiit wrote:
Read the thread, pretty much anything I’d want to say has already been said, so grammar Nazi time.

1:05

[/quote]

“Thumbs up”

Yes, I did fail grammar class. Or, more accurately, I don’t recall ever actually learning grammar.

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[quote]magick wrote:

[quote]magick wrote:
You seem to be saying that you don’t get why people feel for his death while they don’t feel anything for people who can be said to have done actual good.[/quote]

[quote]countingbeans wrote:
No, I “get” why people lament RW’s death, and I even said a couple times now it was perfectly fine [/quote]

Isn’t that the point you’re trying to make on this particular topic regarding Robin William’s death and how his fans seem to be devastated by it?

I apologize, but it would be helpful if you could explain to me what the major differences between that and

[quote]You seem to be saying that you don’t get why people feel for his death while they don’t feel anything for people who can be said to have done actual good.[/quote] are.

-----[/quote]

I guess the simplest way to explain it is we need to “spread the wealth around”.

I hear you, lol. And there are worse thing out there I suppose, but something people should think about the next time something comes up…

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[quote]magick wrote:

I apologize for being quite rude here.
[/quote]

Me as well any times I have been, and to the other dude too.

[quote]
No, I don’t know what’s going on because your posts, as far as I can tell, go like this-

One moment you’re talking as though you’re agreeing with people who say suicide is a sign of weakness/the ultimate selfish act/etc.

The next moment you’re talking about deeply personal feelings concerning suicide/depression and how your brain under depression doesn’t function anything like a normal brain and we can’t expect depressed people to act normally.

They seemed contradictory to me, and so made understanding your position on suicide and depression really hard.

Your response to Lorez’s post (which I agree with) and your response would probably have blown my mind if they existed when I wrote my response.[/quote]

:wink:

Okay, and yeah I misunderstood.

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[quote]MinotaurXXX wrote:

[quote]Jewbacca wrote:

[quote]pushharder wrote:

[quote]smh_23 wrote:

…What gets me is the media circus. I am disgusted by the (lucrative) marathons of mawkish bromide and vapid hyperbole that the media run in the aftermath of a well-liked celebrity’s death. Should we all just pretend that there weren’t kids dying in the United States on the day that Williams expired? Innocent kids who never got the opportunity to make money and have sex with beautiful people and eat expensive meals at exclusive restaurants? This is not to mention the fact that all the Wolf Blitzer/Shep Smith/“now-we’ve-got-Henry-Winkler-on-the-phone” bullshit detracts from the actual tragedy of the actual man who actually killed himself…

[/quote]

This.

I absolutely loathe this.
[/quote]

I mostly agree, but have a couple of points:

  1. There is a distinction to be made between:

(A) suicides from clinical depression and

(B) suicides because one is avoiding something unpleasant (e.g., prison, debt, war) or to cause pain (e.g., committing suicide to emotionally harm others (“I’ll show them!”) and suicide bombers).

While related (and can overlap), the two situations are distinct.

Situation (A) is a medical situation and marked sympathy should be presented. It comes from within and is horrid.

Situation (B) is a social situation that comes from without. I candidly don’t have much sympathy for one who choose to end his or her life because the going got rough.

I think the two sides of this discussion are muddling Situations (A) and (B). The two situations are not the same, logically, medically, or theologically.

  1. The media circus of sympathy and fond memory causes “cluster suicides.” You see this in high schools. (The surprisingly excellent 1988 Christian Slater movie “Heathers” shows this well.) There are a number of studies showing a spike in suicides after a media frenzy like this, especially among kids. It’s almost as if suicides are contagious.

So, while I do understand the need not to mock those with depression, it does not sound like Mr. Williams had that problem. He had a lot of debt, had to do crappy commercial work to pay off bitchy ex-wives. This sounds a lot more like Situation B than Situation A, but I suppose we will never know.

Regardless, because of point 2 above, I do object to the fawning over Mr. Williams. There will be cluster-suicides “inspired” by Mr. Williams.[/quote]

Could this be a combination of A and B? I ask this because he had a history with alcohol and drugs. [/quote]

Depression DOES NOT come from “within”. the man was neglected as a child having to put on a show for his parents to get them to pay attention. this followed by making jokes in school to avoid bullying and that led to a crippling psychological dependence to having an audience and zero social skills in 1 on 1 settings even with close friends.

The man was left broke, but more importantly he was left without an audience possibly for the rest of his life(in prison potentially from not making alimony payments) and that was what killed him.

177

[quote]dt79 wrote:
Thanks for this. And this thread with Beans and others has been enlightening.

Culturally, depression as an incapacitating form of mental illness is pretty foreign to me, especially among the well-to-do, which is why the RW issue really hit home.
[/quote]

Kind of an additional point that might help explain this part. With depression, a lot of actions are motivated by “doing what keeps you from feeling bad”, versus “doing what feels good”. There are all sorts of different things people use to keep the feelings at bay and to cope.

A person who is successful might be putting in all the hard work because they enjoy it and enjoy the success… or they might be doing it because that’s what keeps them from all the horrible feelings they feel doing anything else.

It’s sort of like taking a buddy out after a breakup. He can be in the moment and preoccupied and having a good time, it keeps him from thinking about things. And eventually, a couple days, a week or so the intensity of those feelings wear off and he’s back to his normal self. Except with depression it doesn’t just wear off; it’s always there.

Some people wallow in it, but other people use continual escapism and avoidance. I think that’s an aspect a lot of people don’t realize.

Winston Churchill is one of the better examples of “high-functioning” depression. Depression can limit you, but it doesn’t have to… it just has to be coped with and managed properly.

Also, this

[quote]Commenting on STAR*D, in a 2009 blog, Nassir Ghaemi MD of Tufts University noted that:

Even if antidepressants worked in the short term (2 months, which is also what the meta-analysis assessed), one-half of patients who stayed on them relapsed into depression within one year. At the one year outcome, only about 25% of patients actually had remained well on and tolerated an antidepressant, much below the levels most clinicians seem to feel occurs in their clinical experience.

One in four! According to the best data we have, just one in four individuals treated with an antidepressant get well and stay well. [/quote]

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This is pretty good:

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Looks like he was recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s. My step father has that…nasty fucking disease.

https://www.yahoo.com/movies/wife-robin-williams-had-parkinsons-disease-his-94744481702.html

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Fact: He was not broke
Fact: He was not lacking an audience and could work whenever he wanted to

So neither financial trouble or lack of attention were the reasons he ended up killing himself.

He battled depression, addiction AND it was revealed today that he had early onset Parkinson’s. He had quite a few life experiences that can lead to severe depression (not negating that others might be able to cope with each of these without becoming depressed):
Divorce, child custody battles, lack of attention from parents, alcohol and drug abuse (emphasis on abuse) and now the prospect of suffering from a horrible disease and putting his family through pain. This last one is very important because…

Fact: Many who are depressed and devolve into suicidal thoughts do so not because they want attention, or because they are cowards, it’s because their brain chemistry latches on to the thought that those they love are going to be better of IN THE LONG RUN without them in their lives. “They are better of without me” is one of the biggest motivators the suicidal seem to have. This is very bad for people who are impulsive by nature, as Williams clearly was.

These are not excuses but these are reasons why a depressed, severely impulsive, wealthy, very much loved man could end up killing himself.