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.

The S Word

A friend who used to listen to me on the radio reminded me that there was once a code in the broadcast business to the effect that when people committed suicide, you didn’t mention that particular cause of death on the air. My friend wished we could go back to it. I disagree. The facts, even the unpleasant ones, have the virtue of ending speculation, at least most of the time.

The practice of never saying the S word wasn’t a question of just being “nice.” Suicide has had a long tradition of being unspeakable. If you offed yourself, you were not entitled to burial in the consecrated part of the cemetery. It was a mortal sin, and you were going to hell. You slammed the door on the way out, a major no-no.

Suicide is just one of several things that we once had a tradition, or a convention, of not discussing. Sex, of course, is another. Now, it seems, we discuss everything. Dr. Oz did a whole segment about human waste products on a daytime show not long ago. On his daily nationwide radio program, Dr. Dean Edell used to talk about every physical condition imaginable. You would be surprised (or would have been in the early days of the show) at the subjects people raised.

Talking or not talking, showing or not showing, may actually be cultural. News stations in this country generally did not show the bodies falling out of the burning World Trade Center towers on 9/11, but many foreign news outlets had no such compunction.

As a reporter, I used to have to interview people after disasters. I began to notice a pattern. When white people’s houses burned down, the last thing they wanted to do was talk to the media. But it seemed that homeowners from other ethnic groups actually sought us out to talk to us. I hated to do this particular part of my job – but maybe my own reluctance was cultural. I simply thought I was feeling “respectful.”

While we are more open-minded now, we remain sensitive to the notion that there is an appropriate time and place for raising certain issues. In the case of death, we of course have to be mindful in some measure of the departed’s survivors.

But making nice all the time, or categorically shutting down the discussion of any form of human experience, in the end accomplishes nothing beyond prettifying the scenery. All kinds of things happen to us all the time, pleasant and unpleasant, and the more we learn about them by discussion, the better we can process them – and find out about how Human Being 1.0 actually works.