Oh Captain, My Captain

Public events of mass notary often unearth feelings in others that were dormant for many years. 

Robin Williams was one for me.   It is said that the magnitude of an event is often judged by how much a person can humanly or personally relate to the tragedy.   Mental illness has made the headlines more this past week prompting blog posts, news stories and even horrific postings to relatives twitter accounts, robbins daughter had to take down her profile due to malicious postings with photo shopped pictures of the suicide to comments of  selfishness of her father to commit such an act.   Which brought us all to stand on a soapbox for mental health awareness.  We should be more excepting; we should change the taboo, we as a society need to take off the blinders.  

Mental health is a broad term, one might argue that the same people posting these horrible comments and pictures to a daughters social media account might also suffer from ‘mental illness’ not depression per se, but if these individuals aren’t a little shitty in the head than I don’t really have another excuse.  My point is this; mental illness will most likely never be ‘accepted’ in our society for this very reason.   We don’t get to cherry pick what mental illness we want to support, we don’t get to be angry at loved ones we have lost if that mental illness doesn’t fall into the empathy category.   You see the idea of acceptance is finite.  

I say these things as a human being. i can say these things because I am human and have been slowly educated and advised that depression is wrong, it is crazy and that you should easily be able to snap out of it.   Anyone can write a blog post, mental struggle or not but do you really accept it?    Do you really accept the fact that your daughter, son, sister, brother, mother, father tried to take their life because they were ill?  Chances are probably not.   And yes, society will dictate that, society will judge because that is what we are programmed to do.  

One point that can change is the compassion we have for others.   There have been countless studies and algorithms created on happiness and what defines a person to be happy.   Money is very low, if even existent on that list.   Robin Williams had money, lots of it and after watching the countless videos and clips; I would agree he was in fact a genius.  I don’t think sad is a good emotion to tagline him with though, and in my opinion I think that is where the empathy comes from on some (not all) mental illnesses.  As much as we are wired to be angry, we are wired to ‘feel badly’ for individuals that at face value seem to be ‘sad’.   Depression is sad, to others.    But more importantly and mostly misunderstood is depression is helplessness and inability to decipher between any emotion outside of it.  Including sadness. 

Robin Williams was probably very happy up on stage, a genius he was indeed.  He was also probably very lonely.   One of my favorite movie lines is that of into the wild when at the end of this journey he discovers that happiness is best when shared with others, for depression, its hard almost impossible to make that delineation and when one can’t the unspeakable occurs.  

It is an illness, a very serious illness, and for many its something unfortunately many of us can relate to, but will it be accepted?  Probably not.    All I can ask as a human in the world of millions that we not judge so harshly onto others.  

RIP my captain.