This is an odd post but as someone who has been depressed and suicidal off and on since the age of 13, I don’t love the way people talk about Robin Williams’s suicide without acknowledging the fact he had an extremely aggressive form of dementia at the time he ended his life.

He fought depression and addiction for much of his adult life.

His suicide wasn’t because of the baseline depression he had battled, his brain was quite literally being destroyed at the time of his death. He was helplessly losing bits of himself, his memory, his physical abilities, he was aware, he could feel it and it frightened him. His death should make you angry, not because ‘suicide bad’ but because we are not doing enough to support people with degenerative neurological conditions, it should make you angry that he was misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s and therefore never knew what was happening to his mind.

Instead people make corny asinine posts on the anniversary of his death that say things like “The people that smile the most are often the saddest, check on your funny friends. 🥺” and go back to ignoring mental health for the rest of the year. Completely failing to acknowledge that his suicide wasn’t because he was ‘sad’ it was because he was experiencing one of the worst things a human can experience.