Robin Williams' Suicide, Completely Misunderstood

Laugh, clown, laugh. It may be that comedians, along with people who live with depression and eventually take their own lives, rank among the most misread people anywhere. No image belongs with these words, by the way. Adding one risks turning a tragedy into a spectacle, keeping the focus on the clown instead of the person.

Laughter feels good to all of us. Researchers have even shown it can help the body in its fight against cancer. So why do we chuckle when someone runs themselves down? Why do we laugh at our own expense, and stranger still, why do others knock us and then wait for us to grin along with them?

Here is what gets missed: if a person feels threatened enough to belittle you, maybe you carry more strength and talent than you give yourself credit for. If you weren't, why would anyone treat you as a threat worth cutting down?

The things people say about us keep looping in the head. Sometimes there's a grain of truth buried in it. And most of us would rather laugh than cry. Still, you have to wonder why someone who claims to care about you would say such a thing in the first place.

Ever been told you can't take a joke after someone has had their fun at your expense? Turning the humor on themselves may be how comedians stay ahead of being mocked by others. Some take a different route and tear other people down to land the same result.

What happens far below the surface, to a person's sense of worth? Repeat that careless loop of inner chatter often enough and it starts to feel like fact, to you and maybe to the people around you. Mockery isn't funny; it gnaws at you from inside. Bad enough when it comes from someone else, but when you turn it on yourself, well, that's a kind of betrayal.

Once you get skilled at it, stopping gets hard, because people start counting on the show, anywhere, any hour. Picture a comedian cracking jokes at his own spouse's funeral. I can picture it. What a sad sack.

When the jokes bring both applause and a paycheck, it feels like it must be worth something, and before long it's simply who you are. So why the misery underneath? Why would someone choose to die to escape it? Most people are told not to bring work home, yet comedians do exactly that. Worse, nobody signs up to weep alongside you when all they came for was a laugh or two.

Think of someone selling their body for money who hates every minute of it. In a way a comedian does something close to that to get by in the world. You can't fake your way into joy by performing it. Only the genuine article does the trick.

Now layer depression on top: the dark night of the soul, where a person feels hopeless, convinced they're the worst human alive, maybe even bound for hell if they end it, no matter how unreasonable that looks to anyone watching. Call it an occupational hazard of the trade, especially when the bleakness feeds a grim brand of comedy that earns laughs and approval. In an odd way that becomes a reward for staying depressed. Drugs offer another route, a way to self-medicate that works for a stretch before it turns toward wreckage and death, or an 'accidental' exit.

Stack onto that the chance that the same person swings into manic phases too, sometimes extreme ones, that pour fuel on the comedy and the creativity while wrecking their judgment. Medicate those highs and you often end up slaughtering the goose that laid the golden egg.

Don't condemn Robin Williams for ending his life as he saw it rather than as we imagine we understand it. Aren't people who reach that point often already living in a kind of hell on this side, long before they cross to the other? Who among us gets to pass judgment on them?

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