Post on actor’s depression and death goes viral, stirs up negative reactions

Aug 14, 2014 12:54 GMT  ·  By

Robin Williams died on August 11, after a long struggle with depression that drove him to the desperate gesture of taking his own life. He leaves behind a grieving wife and 3 children and millions of people who sincerely mourn for him even though they never knew him but through his work.

According to popular Christian blogger Matt Walsh, Robin Williams did not die “from depression” (i.e. because he had struggled with it for decades and had lost all will to fight) but “by choice”: he made a conscious and very selfish choice to end his own life.

Walsh’s post has gone viral, reigniting the age-old debate on mental illness and religion.

It was only natural for this to happen, since Walsh insists that, after struggling with depression himself, he knows for a fact that it’s not just a chemical imbalance in the brain but a spiritual affliction as well. The body and the soul are inseparable, and if there’s an imbalance in the former, the latter is also affected.

Robin Williams needed God (and joy) in his life and he would not have taken his own life: the imbalance would have disappeared.

“I can’t comprehend it,” Walsh writes. “The complete, total, absolute rejection of life. The final refusal to see the worth in anything, or the beauty, or the reason, or the point, or the hope. The willingness to saddle your family with the pain and misery and anger that will now plague them for the rest of their lives.”

“It’s a tragic choice, truly, but it is a choice, and we have to remember that. Your suicide doesn’t happen to you; it doesn’t attack you like cancer or descend upon you like a tornado. It is a decision made by an individual. A bad decision. Always a bad decision,” he continues.

Walsh joins all those who feel that, in our desire to say something nice about the late actor, we come up with phrases like “he is free now,” “he is happy,” or “he’s cracking jokes in Heaven” because, he says, this sends the wrong message to millions who might struggle with depression too and might even consider suicide as well.

There is nothing liberating about the killing of the self, he says. Only God can make one free.

“First, suicide does not claim anyone against their will. No matter how depressed you are, you never have to make that choice. That choice. Whether you call depression a disease or not, please don’t make the mistake of saying that someone who commits suicide ‘died from depression’,” Walsh says.

“No, he died from his choice. He died by his own hand. Depression will not appear on the autopsy report, because it can’t kill you on its own. It needs you to pull the trigger, take the pills, or hang the rope. To act like death by suicide is exactly analogous to death by malaria or heart failure is to steal hope from the suicidal person. We think we are comforting him, but in fact we are convincing him that he is powerless. We are giving him a way out, an excuse. Sometimes that’s all he needs — the last straw,” he adds.

Walsh isn’t the only public figure to describe Williams’ desperate gesture in terms of “cowardly” or “selfish” because he did not think of the kind of pain it would inflict on those he left behind, particularly his family. However, he’s probably the first that won’t apologize because he insists he’s right. Even if he’s not, he has the right to speak his mind – and that he will continue to do.