Originally posted by square_peg
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Phrasing it as "the final refusal to see the worth in anything" and "the willingness to saddle your family with pain and misery" is disturbing and inaccurate. Depression-influenced suicide didn't involve refusal, but an inability to see worth and beauty and a reason to continue. Walsh makes it sound like Robin Williams woke up one day and thought "Let's see, what shall I do today? Go on living, or saddle my family with pain and misery for the rest of their lives? Hmm...I dunno, I think I'm feeling option #2 today. Think I'll go with that." In reality, some depressed individuals feel that they're a burden or nuisance on their family, and are led to believe that suicide is the way to remove that and make things easier on their loved ones. When Walsh speaks of it being a choice, he seems to be saying that suicide, unlike afflictions such as cancer or natural disasters, is something within one's control, but that's where he misrepresents the nature of depression. It warps and distorts one's thinking so that ultimately the depression, not the individual, is in control.
Here's what David Foster Wallace* (another brilliant man who tragically took his own life in the throes of depression) said about the illness:
So you could say that suicide is a "choice" in the sense that a conscious decision was made to fashion the noose, but it isn't a choice between two or more options, because the nature of depression is such that the individual becomes convinced that suicide is the only option. And more significantly, it wasn't Robin Williams who made the choice, but the depression that hijacked his mind.
*Who, come to think of it, was once said to be to literature what Robin Williams was to comedy
Here's what David Foster Wallace* (another brilliant man who tragically took his own life in the throes of depression) said about the illness:
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
So you could say that suicide is a "choice" in the sense that a conscious decision was made to fashion the noose, but it isn't a choice between two or more options, because the nature of depression is such that the individual becomes convinced that suicide is the only option. And more significantly, it wasn't Robin Williams who made the choice, but the depression that hijacked his mind.
*Who, come to think of it, was once said to be to literature what Robin Williams was to comedy
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