disclaimer. i am not a mental health professional. i know nothing about nothing. i am not a drug and alcohol counsellor. I have never been to rehab.
robin williams.
i’ve waited a day to try to compose this, and i’m not trying to make anybody freaked out. but here’s what i wonder…
what’s crappy about the story in the media — as it’s being presented — is that we don’t know how much he was reaching out. we don’t know if he was working his ‘program’ …
Depression / alcohol likes to get us alone in a room and convince us we’re not worthwhile. Which is total bullshit. and anyone he would have asked, would have told him that his thoughts about himself and his situation just were not true.
that noise in his head? not true. not true. not true.
i know. this is really hard shit. it really is. and what other people think about you isn’t enough to change what you think about you.
but if you stop 1000 people on the street, and they agree that you’re a pretty decent human, and you’re still like “oh i’m a fuck up” then it’s POSSIBLE that your brain is lying to you. well, it’s possible, right?
i don’t want to ‘blame the victim’. If i’m worried about what happened, and feel like it ‘could happen to me’, then i think this: maybe he wasn’t reaching out (enough). maybe he’d tried medications but hadn’t gone back to have them adjusted. Maybe he felt worthless and couldn’t figure a way out and he stopped reaching out. If he was in rehab last month maybe he came home too soon and could have stayed longer, but he thought he ‘was fine’…
We don’t know the whole big story. What we’re presented in the media makes it seem, in a very tiny (small-print) way, like what happened to him was inevitable. He struggled he struggled he struggled he died.
The very real idea of depression and booze is there in the media story, but they don’t focus enough, in my opinion on: “if you feel crappy, it’s entirely possible that your brain is lying to you. so tell someone. take your medications. tell someone else. bang on doors until you get some answers. and don’t give up.
cuz that lying part of your brain? not true. not true. not true.