Chickens, Eggs, and a Robin

It’s been days now since Robin Williams’ suicide, and we’re still talking about it. I think this is my third post on this – and if you pull the plug here, I’ll certainly understand – but it’s a clear indication that many of us have been affected at a very deep level. This fellow was not a head of state or a religious leader or a military hero. He was a comedian and a movie star. Are we overdoing it? Some of us still have to talk about it.

Not all the talk, IMHO, has been useful. The other day, one of the cable channels had some expert on with two graphics: one of a “normal” brain and the other of an addict, showing the areas of damage in the addict’s brain. No, the news anchor hastened to add, the damaged-brain graphic was not Robin’s.

Still others have posted Robin’s astrological chart to show why this was a rough time for him. Now, his widow has revealed that he was in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease, and the docs are on TV again, telling us about the statistical relationship between Parkinson’s and depression. If someone diagnosed me with that, I think I might be a little depressed. Even the medical expert said that while there is a relationship, we don’t quite know exactly what it is, which is the chicken and which the egg.

The one that bothers me most is the attempt to link genius or extraordinary artistic talent with mental illness. We know what genius is when we encounter it. “Mental illness” is something we have to define, with experts telling us what’s normal and abnormal and whether we need to take pills for it. Yes, clinical depression and bipolarity are real things, but reducing genius to a chemical imbalance is offensive, at least to me.

Is Williams’ suicide a wake-up call about the prevalence of mental illness? One former actress actually called on Congress to do something about it. Ah, now THERE’S a bastion of sanity for you. And don’t we always say the same thing after a wacko shoots up a school?

It’s interesting that we refer to artistic talents as “gifts” – maybe a bad word, since they usually come with a price, and for whatever reason you want to plug in here, Robin Williams just couldn’t pay it. Should it be left there?

I guess, though, we have to cut ourselves a little slack. Trying to arrive at a conclusion won’t make us feel much better about Robin Williams’ death, but it’s our coping mechanism to avoid feeling too much grief. Are we learning something about the human experience from all this discussion? Yes, but explanation’s chief benefit is that it allows us eventually to put this tragedy on the shelf so we can go on with our own lives. It’s that awful word “closure.”

At some point, however, we’re going to have to admit to ourselves that we’re just not qualified to dissect souls.