Robin Williams: "Us crazy ones love you."

His co-star on The Crazy Ones, Sarah Michelle Gellar, used that short phrase in my title to end her remarks to 'People' about him, and when I read it, I wanted to cry, because there are a lot of us 'crazy ones'.

I've been reading some of the comments under some of the articles about his shocking passing, and too many of those seem to be coming from people who haven't the least idea what it's like to have substance-abuse problems and to be struggling with bouts of severe depression. They make all that seem like some kind of personal disobedience, or some optional choices we make to be depressed or alcoholic or drug-addicted, and it isn't like that at all.

There's no cure for that kind of severe depression, because those who have it are built that way, and the only real cure would be to rebuild their DNA and their corresponding genetic codes to correct for the missing or defective genes that
prevented our systems from assimilating minute-but-essential trace elements  among the chemicals in our food and water - elements essential for maintaining a proper balance in our body chemistry, particularly that portion of it which regulates the central nervous system and controls our mood-swings, and our blood plasma electrolytes, and thereby keeps us within a normal range of emotions, avoiding the extremes of becoming really manic or really depressed.

These genetic deficiencies can be compensated for with the right medications,
which often have unpleasant side-effects, or make us feel totally unlike our usual selves, thus tempting us to stop using them. The medications, after all,
aren't for our own benefit, but rather for the benefit of everyone else around us with whom we regularly interact. And alcohol, being a depressant itself, often masks the fact that we might otherwise be having a manic 'high' - but when we go down, we really go down, and there aren't many things (legal ones anyway) that can pull us back up. And being really depressed is like having a lot of your brain seemingly replaced with something very dark and gloomy and foreboding and hopeless and completely lacking in optimism or anything like it, and you just can't shake it off. And you just want it to stop. And that's when thoughts of suicide are likely to begin. And none of that really relates to your physical situation or to whether or not you're successful or rich or poor or famous or just a nobody. All that is irrelevant, because there's no way past this big black cloud inside your head that's telling you everything's hopeless and there's no escape.

If you have a good 'shrink', he or she will tell you that you should always have someone close to you who can monitor your moods, and watch for signs that
you're in real trouble, and get you help. And that 'help' consists of correcting and stabilizing your body chemistry, and keeping you away from those things that you may be tempted to use for 'self-medicating' like booze and drugs.

And for some of us, all of that works, and we live to a wrinkled old age, like me.
Unfortunately, there are those like my oldest daughter and Robin Williams who didn't have the right help when it was needed, and didn't make it out of that black hopelessness which consumed them. And may God hold them in the palm of his hand, and comfort them in ways we couldn't, in a much better place.