re: Ole Miss fan Shepard Smith, calls Robin Williams a coward

quote:

---

Suicide like the warden in Shawshank checking out before he got raped in prison is the cowards situation but mental health suicide is a whole different ballgame yet folks act like mental illness is contagious or just brush it off. Spend some time with workers in a facility and you will get a much better view on just how tough things can be.

---

This.

But so many ignorant people will not understand this as they see suicide in a black and white view. There's no gray area or middle ground to them. They're just not educated enough or actually experienced it. Mental illness and depression can actually be a big bitch that will frick your shite up yet people act like you can wait it out like its a common cold. The basic huan instinct of self preservation is one of the most intense and strongest things a human has so it takes a hell of a lot of force to overcome that and actually pull the trigger.

quote:

---

I'm super in the middle on both lines of thinking.

The recent mass shootings we've had have made me research mental health, depression, and the (in)validity that we as a nation give it. I've changed a lot of conservative viewpoints I used to have because of it.

I absolutely get that it's a real thing and do not fault a man for struggling with it and battling those demons. Be it chemical or biological, it's real and I don't wish it in my worst enemy.

That being said, I do fault somebody for losing that battle.

Not demonizing him or calling him names, like Shep and Rush, but it taints a lot of his work and legacy as a man IMHO.

---

I admire anyone willing to evolve and change their views (and admit to this) on a topic as complex and emotional as this one.

I will address a nuance at the end, though. Granted, it's not something I've struggled with personally, but it's certainly something people I've been close to have struggled with, and a lot of the time, it's not so much a "battle" as people think. A "battle" implies a fight between X and Y, and, as I understand it, sometimes there's no fight. The person isn't striving to rise up against the crippling depression simply because the very nature of the depression makes the idea of fighting seem incomprehensible. It's almost a Catch-22, really. Deep down, they may know intellectually that there's a choice, but emotionally, no choice, no fight, seems possible. How do you lose a battle you can't even imagine fighting? Mental illness is very Orwellian at times.

quote:

---

I do comprehend what you're getting at and agree that "battle" can be an incorrect word choice.

At the end of the day, it is not cancer that can win the "battle" no matter how far you are willing to go.

Now I have to admit that the idea of depression is so foreign to me I can't even comprehend it. My wife feels that I have the opposite disease of perpetual happiness and blissful ignorance, so I don't speak from experience, but a sincere place of empathy and staunch believer in personal responsibility.

---

I get where you're coming from. I'm a happy person too, always have been, so the first time someone close to me committed suicide, I was so fricking angry with her, angrier than I'd ever been before, or since. It was hard work learning to understand that she had problems I didn't, and had very little control over them. Once I finally did come to grips with that, I was very ashamed of myself. It wasn't my fault that I didn't understand, any more than it was her fault that she suffered from clinical depression, but I was still pretty ashamed. That's why it annoys me when people -- not you, others in this thread -- seem congenitally incapable of seeing past their own noses, but I still understand where they're at because I was there once too.