Robin Williams"s widow reveals how dying actor fought "chemical warfare in his brain"

The widow of Robin Williams has lifted the lid on the actor’s struggle with a debilitating neurological disease in the months before he took his own life, likening it to “chemical warfare in his brain”.

Writing in the journal of the American Academy of Neurology, Williams’ wife Susan Schneider Williams has detailed the final months of her husband’s life as the couple struggled to respond to his devastating decline in health.

Williams took his own life in August 2014.

Three months before his death Williams was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, but Schneider Williams has previously revealed the autopsy identified that he had suffered from Lewy body disease (LBD).

In her essay, “the terrorist inside my husband’s brain”, she said doctors would later discover it was instead one of the worst cases they had ever seen.

LBD is an incurable form of neurodegenerative disease. It is the second most common form of dementia after Alzheimer’s, with which it shares many symptoms, and can be misdiagnosed as Parkinson’s disease.

In October 2013, on the couple’s second wedding anniversary, Williams experienced gut discomfort, and fear and anxiety which “skyrocketed to a point that was alarming”, Schneider Williams wrote.

He had already been experiencing various physical ailments, which had been intermittent and which the couple and doctors had believed were unrelated. By December he would suffer from increasing levels of “paranoia, delusions and looping, insomnia, memory, and high cortisol levels”.

After his death doctors found that a high concentration of Lewy bodies in his brain’s amygdala had caused the acute paranoia and “out-of-character emotional responses”.

Schneider Williams described it as “chemical warfare in his brain”.

“How I wish he could have known why he was struggling, that it was not a weakness in his heart, spirit, or character,” she said.

Over the following months Williams suffered from panic attacks and memory loss, struggling to remember lines during the shooting of Night at the Museum 3.

He kept saying, ‘I just want to reboot my brain’.

His mental state declined, and Schneider Williams found herself increasingly unable to reassure his anxieties and insecurities.

“Robin was losing his mind and he was aware of it. Can you imagine the pain he felt as he experienced himself disintegrating? And not from something he would ever know the name of, or understand? Neither he, nor anyone could stop it – no amount of intelligence or love could hold it back,” she said.

“He kept saying, ‘I just want to reboot my brain’.”

While had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, Schneider Williams wrote that after his death it became apparent that, pathologically, he suffered from diffuse LBD.

“One neuropathologist described LBD and [Parkinson’s disease] as being at opposite ends of a disease spectrum. That spectrum is based on something they share in common: the presence of Lewy bodies – the unnatural clumping of the normal protein, a-synuclein, within brain neurons,” she said.

Schneider Williams said four doctors examined her husband’s autopsy report and final two years of medical records and they “indicated his was one of the worst pathologies they had seen”.

“He had about 40% loss of dopamine neurons and almost no neurons were free of Lewy bodies throughout the entire brain and brainstem.”

She said the medical team had been on the right track in diagnosing and treating Williams before he died, but she would never know if that would have made a difference.

“I am not convinced that the knowledge would have done much more than prolong Robin’s agony while he would surely become one of the most famous test subjects of new medicines and ongoing medical trials,” she said.

“Even if we experienced some level of comfort in knowing the name, and fleeting hope from temporary comfort with medications, the terrorist was still going to kill him.”

Schneider Williams, who was last week appointed to the American Brain Foundation’s board of directors, said she wrote the essay to increase neurologists’ understanding of patients and caregivers and to “add a few more faces” to the reasons they conduct research.

• In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here.

Robin Williams"s widow reveals how dying actor fought "chemical warfare in his brain"

Robin Williams And The Dark Side Of The Comedic Mind

It’s no secret that creativity and psychological illness are intimately connected – the death of Robin Williams yesterday was, possibly, a unhappy testament to that truth. Williams was arguably a single of the best examples of the two extraordinary creativity and the darker sides of that sort of genius: Serious depression and drug addiction. Amongst his numerous skills, Williams was well-known for his capacity to draw striking and hilarious connections between subjects – and to flit back and forth in between them – at thoughts-blowing speeds. A.O Scott in The New York Times writes, “The only thing quicker than his mouth was his mind, which was capable of breathtaking leaps of totally free-associative absurdity.”

So why are creativity – such as comedy – and mental illness so intertwined? Like any imaginative occupation – writer, musician, and artist – the answer may possibly be that the comedian’s brain may well be wired a small bit in a different way to get started with.

In interviews, Williams was quite open about his battles with cocaine and alcohol, which he famously gave up in the 1980s. He said in a Folks magazine interview in 1988, that cocaine “was a spot to hide. Most people get hyper on coke. It slowed me down.” Soon after being sober for a lot more than 20 many years, Williams relapsed into drinking in 2004 soon after his excellent buddy Christopher Reeve, with whom he’d attended Julliard, died. He checked himself into an addiction facility in 2006 to help him with his alcohol addiction. In 2009, Williams had heart surgery, which is stated to have affected him deeply. Earlier this yr, he went back into remedy, to “finetune” his sobriety.

It’s hard to know what Williams’ inner dialogue was like, but it was, undoubtedly, a dark one at times. “You’re standing at a precipice and you seem down, there is a voice and it is a tiny quiet voice that goes, ‘Jump,’” Williams said in an interview with Diane Sawyer in 2006. “The identical voice that goes, ‘Just one.’ … And the concept of ‘just one’ for an individual who has no tolerance for it, that is not the likelihood.”

The Dark Side of the Comedic Mind

That comedians can have extreme dark sides underneath their humor is one more well-identified reality. A examine earlier this yr in the British Journal of Psychiatry identified a robust connection between comedic prowess and, if not precisely psychosis, some thing close to it. The authors wished to see if comedy fell into the identical category of other types of creativity, lengthy imagined to be both solution of mental illness, or an escape from it. “Being creative – writing, composing, painting and getting humorous – might therefore be an outlet,” they publish, “an escape from the pain of depression. The poet and writer Antonin Artaud, who himself experienced critical psychological illness, wrote, ‘No a single has ever written, painted or sculpted, modeled, built or invented except practically to get out of hell.’”

The authors had 523 comedians from the U.S., Britain, and Australia, total personality exams, and identified a stronger probability for schizotypy – the propensity for psychotic character traits, without full-blown psychosis – as properly as traits that may possibly blur into manic-depressive disorder. Most fascinating was that comedians, compared to typical old actors, had traits of the two introverts and extroverts, which the authors say could “combine synergistically to facilitate comedic overall performance.”

Comedians’ brains are continually combing their reservoir of expertise to arrive at unexpected – and as a result comical – connections and commentary on daily life. A single comedian in the examine likened the comedic brain to a large-velocity Google search: “Comedians train their brains to believe in wide associative patterns. This relates to joke writing, the place the word ‘bicycle’ brings up a image of a bicycle in the mind of a noncomedian, but for the comedian it’s like working a search on the Internet—everything relevant pops up, from photos of unwanted fat people riding bicycles naked and obtaining chafed to the fact that Lance Armstrong has only one particular testicle.”

Williams wasn’t the only comedian to examine the dark dialogue inside of. The review also recalls the now-renowned quote by Stephen Fry, host of the BBC quiz show QI. He talked candidly about his very own second-to-minute double-reality: “There are instances when I’m doing QI and I’m going ‘ha ha, yeah, yeah,’ and inside I’m going ‘I want to fucking die. I… want… to… fucking… die.’”

For Williams, his demons were not so hidden, and many have pointed out that the sadness was noticeable in his crystal blue eyes. “Mr. Williams spoke about this himself,” says Constance Scharff, PhD, Senior Addiction Analysis Fellow and Director of Addiction Investigation, at California therapy center Cliffside Malibu. “He had spoken too about how occasionally it is crucial to be funny when you are speaking about genuinely unpleasant topics. Humor can be a device to obfuscate discomfort. How many comedians have we watched die from addiction (accidental overdose) or suicide? Occasionally people make us laugh so we can not see how considerably they hurt.”

The Inventive, Addictive Brain

The brains of some of us are undeniably, and genetically, predisposed to addiction. For higher-powered businesspeople and “creatives” alike, there would seem to be a distinct tendency for chemical dependence. It is not that the one particular prospects to the other – basically that the traits coexist, maybe sharing a fundamental wiring that ups the odds for the two.

“I’ve read through reports stating that about fifty-% of addicts also have a co-happening psychological disorder, this kind of as depression or anxiety,” says Richard Taite, founder and CEO, Cliffside Malibu. “In our expertise, the percentage is significantly higher. All around three out of four of our clients have issues with addiction and a co-taking place disorder. With the most innovative people, we can count on co-happening issues in almost all of them.”

But yet again, a single is not always a trigger for the other. And there’s something to be explained for the extremely-sensitive person theory – that some of us could just be much more in tune with the globe, comedy and tragedy alike. “I really don’t believe that artistic talent – and I imply this in the broadest sense of acting, music, writing, visual arts, dance, and so on. – is causative of these difficulties of addiction, depression or suicidal thoughts,” says Taite. “Rather, I think that individuals who are imaginative have an empathy for and sensitivity to the globe that enables them to come to feel things deeply. I believe Mr. Williams could deeply feel and encounter the ache in the world, the discomfort in his daily life – and among those who orient towards depression – both creativity and addiction are ways out, techniques to truly feel and to truly feel if not much more hopeful, at least less unhappy.”

A Sad Ending to A Wealthy Existence

Article following article will tell you that support could have been there for the 34,000 individuals who commit suicide every single yr. This is largely true. The irony, of program, is that extreme depression can prevent a person from believing that treatment could assist.

Robin Williams And The Dark Side Of The Comedic Mind

Robin Williams" Death Demonstrates Suicide Can Strike At Any Age. Here Are Approaches To Avoid It

It is currently being reported that Robin Williams, 1 of the best comedians and dramatic actors of his time, has died through an obvious suicide. It is hard to fathom that an individual who not only brought us laughter and joy as Mork, Mrs. Doubtfire, and the Genie but also affirmed the deeper worth of residing in Dead Poets’ Society, Good Morning Vietnam, and Goodwill Hunting, could finish up taking his own daily life. But that is the dark irony of getting human.

Another surprise to some may be that Williams would last but not least succumb to depression, which he’d fought publicly, decades right after he appeared to corralled his worst demons, like addiction. The well-known picture of suicide is the one particular presented in Dead Poets, of a younger guy unable to come to terms with adulthood. Our image of suicide typically tends to be young, like Kurt Cobain or Sylvia Plath.  That almost certainly comes from our tendency to romanticize depression, a deadly ailment that is not romantic.

Hunting at the data offered from the Centers for Ailment Management &amp Prevention tells a quite different story. Suicide is practically twice as common among adults as adolescents. Amid middle-aged men and women, it looks to be on the rise. The highest charges are between guys amongst the ages of 45 and 59. Thirty out of every one hundred,000 such males take their lives yearly, compared to about 9 of each and every one hundred,000 girls in the very same age range. For both males and females of that age, the suicide price rose about 50% in between 1999 and 2009, for factors that are not totally clear.

Suicide Charges by age. Source: Centers for Condition Management &amp Prevention

William’s lifestyle brought hundreds of thousands of people laughter and catharsis. His death robs us of that, and robs his household of him. If any excellent can come of this, it may be to remind us that men and women of any age can be suicidal.  The CDC says to view for these warning signs:

• Talking about wanting to die


• Looking for a way to kill oneself


• Speaking about feeling hopeless or obtaining no objective


• Speaking about feeling trapped or in unbearable soreness


• Speaking about being a burden to other individuals


• Rising the use of alcohol or medication


• Acting anxious, agitated or recklessly


• Sleeping too minor or too much


• Withdrawing or feeling isolated


• Displaying rage or speaking about looking for revenge


• Displaying excessive mood swings

The more serious these signs are, the higher the risk is. If a pal or loved 1 is displaying these signs, really don’t leave them alone. Preserve them away from firearms, which are the most widespread implies of self-harm in the United States, and also eliminate any alcohol, medication, or sharp objects. And then get aid. You can call the National Suicide Prevention assist line at 800-273-Speak (8255), or yet another suicide assist line. You can speak to a psychiatrist. You can get your loved a single to the emergency space.

Not each and every suicide can be prevented. But the loss of lifestyle and the damage carried out to these left behind make it worth performing the best we can. And survivors often regret attempting to die. I’m reminded of this passage Tad Friend’s remarkable 2003 New Yorker examine of these who leap off the Golden Gate Bridge:

Survivors typically regret their decision in midair, if not just before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines the two say they hurdled in excess of the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord they might shed their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to anticipate him home until late. “I needed to disappear,” he explained. “So the Golden Gate was the spot. I’d heard that the water just sweeps you under.” On the bridge, Baldwin counted to 10 and stayed frozen. He counted to 10 yet again, then vaulted above. “I nonetheless see my hands coming off the railing,” he explained. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I immediately realized that everything in my lifestyle that I’d considered was unfixable was completely fixable—except for getting just jumped.”

I locate this letter, by English comedian Stephen Fry, to be beneficial, also. A tip of the hat to science author Ed Yong for displaying it to me. To Fry, depression is a whole lot like the weather.

Here are some apparent things about the climate:

It’s actual.
You can not modify it by wishing it away.
If it’s dark and rainy it really is dark and rainy and you can’t alter it.
It might be dark and rainy for two weeks in a row.

BUT

It will be sunny a single day.
It is not under one’s manage as to when the sun comes out, but come out it will.
1 day.

The sun actually will come out, if not tomorrow, someday. And it is really worth waiting for.

Robin Williams" Death Demonstrates Suicide Can Strike At Any Age. Here Are Approaches To Avoid It

Robin Williams Discovered Dead In Marin County House: Suicide Suspected

Just hrs ago, my regional paper reported that Robin Williams is dead, discovered in his home in Tiburon, California, just miles from my house. Here in Marin County, exactly where I live, reside many renowned people, musicians and actors most notable amid them. But none is as beloved a native son as Robin Williams.

The notification from the Marin County Sheriff Coroner’s division describes Williams’ death by asphyxiation as suspected suicide.

Williams was found dead at noon these days right after a 9-1-one contact was placed from the house at 11:fifty five a.m.  The Marin County Sheriff’s Office, the Tiburon Fire Department and the Southern Marin Fire Protection District all sent emergency personnel to the scene, arriving practically instantly at 12:00 pm. Williams lived in the home, on the Tiburon peninsula with his wife, Susan Schneider, but it isn’t clear if she was present in the home the evening he died.

Williams had wed Schneider, a graphic designer, in the nearby Napa Valley on October 23, 2011. ”I lost my husband and my greatest good friend, while the planet misplaced a single of its most beloved artists and gorgeous human beings,” explained Schneider. “I am utterly heartbroken.”

Robin Williams, actor and comedian, is dead in his Marin County property. (photograph: Wikipedia)

Right here is the real wording from the Coroner’s Division of the Marin County Sheriff’s Department:

“The male subject, pronounced deceased at 12:02 pm has been identified as Robin McLaurin Williams, a 63 year previous resident of unincorporated Tiburon, CA. An investigation into the lead to, manner, and circumstances of the death is presently underway by the Investigations and Coroner Divisions of the Sheriff’s Office.

Preliminary details developed for the duration of the investigation signifies Mr. Williams was final seen alive at his residence, where he resides with his wife, at roughly 10:00 pm on August 10, 2014. Mr. Williams was located this morning shortly ahead of the 9-one-1 call was placed to Marin County Communications. At this time, the Sheriff’s Office Coroner Division suspects the death to be a suicide due to asphyxia, but a comprehensive investigation must be finished before a final determination is produced.”

If Williams’ death does demonstrate a suicide, that of program makes this tragedy that a lot worse. How could Robin Williams, with a life as profitable as any person could wish for, be depressed sufficient to take his own lifestyle? Or, place even a lot more simply, who could somebody who manufactured us laugh so tough be so sad?

That Williams battled alcoholism, drug addiction, and depression is no secret. The actor gave numerous candid interviews describing his battles with these demons, and his successes at beating them – at least temporarily. Williams’ publicist gave a quick statement saying that Williams had been “battling extreme depression” but stopped brief of calling the death a suicide.

Most lately, Williams had his personal Television demonstrate, The Crazy Ones, in which he played the zany dad of Sarah Michelle Gellars, with whom he worked in an marketing company. The demonstrate was cancelled after its initial season due to minimal ratings and mediocre evaluations. Could that have been one particular of the aspects triggering Williams’ depression? Of course we really don’t know, we’ll most likely in no way know.

So let’s speak about severe depression and suicide.

Conserve (Suicide Awareness Voices of Schooling) has some exceptional info about depression and suicide, which admirably avoids the us-vs-them frame of mind that pervades significantly of the reporting and investigation on this subject. Like this explanation of why men and women who are severely depressed really don’t seek out – or might not react to – help and treatment.

“Many folks who endure from depression report feeling as though they’ve misplaced the capacity to envision a content potential, or bear in mind a content previous. Frequently they do not realize they’re struggling from a treatable sickness, and seeking support may not even enter their thoughts. Emotions and even physical ache can grow to be unbearable. They really do not want to die, but it’s the only way they come to feel their soreness will end.”

Robin Williams Discovered Dead In Marin County House: Suicide Suspected