Good Morning and Goodbye Robin Williams

Today we bid farewell to another outstanding actor and comedian Robin Williams. Initial finding was he had committed suicide. According to the statement released by his representative, Robin Williams has been suffering from severe depression and probably eventually gave in to it. I have read some people’s comments about not understanding how people as successful as Robin Williams would be depressed and killed himself. I personally think these comments are quite ill informed and lack of compassion.

I had worked with a medical association for a few years now role-playing for their accreditation for their clinical psychiatrists. During these few years I have learnt a lot about depression – the cause of it and the difficulty in treatment. Unlike some other illnesses, depression is the dysfunction of the mind that by no means physical treatments can touch fully upon. Medication and tablets attempt to cure it from a physical perspective in a way that it raises the physical threshold with the mental system. But ultimately it is the environment you are in and the events that surround you that matter most. While family and friend support are essential to recovery, personal will power and strength accounts a lot in the recovery process. And this is the hardest part because nobody else can experience what you are experiencing.

When you are battling depression, it is not just about “getting better” or “if someone wants to get better”. It is about getting better while attempting to overcome mental thresholds that tax you body and mind at the same time. You can be severely weakened during the process and all you need is just a stone being thrown into the water to trigger that ripple effect of disturbance in your head. Modern medication, as mentioned earlier, aims to raise this threshold against disturbances but ultimately it is the environment one is in that matters. And by environment, I mean the uncontrollable world around us. And the scary part is you can never predict what in the world around you would trigger that ripple effect.

While this is hard enough for day-to-day people to deal with this, for artists it is even harder. As an actor, I understand the pressure of the art in relation to life. Acting is a subjective business and as I always tell people it is taxing on your mind. In terms of acting, you could be a brilliant actor but still can’t score any jobs because you are not the hot one, or the right look or because you don’t know the power holder as good as the other person. There is no objective list to check against. You attend auditions doing your best, got great feedbacks but then when you know someone who is a bad actor or don’t even look remotely to the brief got the job, you could feel frustrated and dejected. It is a last man standing kind of business. For some people the continued validation through acting work builds up a very high and dangerous stage for them to tread on as one mis-step you could fall in a disastrous manner.

I personally do not know Robin Williams, but external success does not guarantee immunity against depression. No pass or future success would help one out of depression. Depression is a beast that lurks in the shadows that attempts to snatch and devour you whenever you are not alert. I remember there was one episode in Doctor Who known as Silence in the Library where victims were taken when they took one mis-step into a shadow. This is how depression works. For people to make comment about other people’s depression, I personally feel that it is disrespectful and unnecessarily judgmental.

I think everyone has his / her fair share of disappointments in life, but just basing on your personal experience to judge upon other people’s failure is something that I tried to avoid. Not that I had not done it in the past. I am a critical and judgmental person, especially when I was much younger, but the past 10 years or so in the acting industry taught me a lot of things – that includes not to judging others simply because of your own experience. The fact is you are only living your own life and you have no idea what other people had gone through or experienced. Simply expanding you own experience as a structure of judgment for others will only show your inadequacy and shallowness.

I might seem extremely opinionated on this issue but I do feel that if other people want to judge Robin Williams, they deserved to be judged too.