In the wake of Robin William’s death there has been a lot of trying to explain what brings someone to suicide. Impending dementia, or prescription drugs have been offered as explanations. I don’t know that there is any way to understand the dark thoughts of another, the speculation sounds misdirected.
I do think that we sometimes find ourselves deep something unrelenting and unbearable. Suicide can not be easily, or rationally, explained.
A personal account I read this week that resonated more than the recent guesses, in the newspapers, around what may have gone wrong for an actor and funny man was this description of losing oneself by another man:
“”It gets to the point where you just don’t recognise yourself,” Marc Pierre, a physical therapist in Los Angeles, says of the depression he has experienced.
“You look in the mirror and just have no connection to what you are seeing. The fire raging inside your skull is so intense and requires so much energy it is difficult to interject any sense of beauty, of appreciation, of love…I was heading into a well with no stairway.”” From Shock by Dukakis K. and Tye L. p.16