RIP Anthony Bourdain

If you want to see mockery, take a look back at some of the threads here when rich/famous people died of drug or alcohol addiction. All of the empathy on display here went right out the window.

 

At age 21, I went 37 straight days without talking, a bizarre, still inexplicable selective muteness I only ended with a five-mile shoeless walk down an Appalachian highway to get to an emergency room. I felt like a two-ton brick building was sitting on my chest. I believed I'd let down every person I'd ever met. The only reason I didn't kill myself was because of how crushed my parents would be. It took five years of medication and a teardown/re-wiring of they way I thought to dig out of the hole.

And yet I still have no earthly idea what went through Anthony Bourdain's head last night, his motives or whether what he did was selfish or completely understandable given his state of mind. Because I don't know if what I felt was only a fraction of the weight he did. That's a terrifying thought to me.

 

Holy fuck! This is dumb.

 

I'm sure there are some pedophiles you could be out defending instead of educating us on depression.

 

For my money he was one of the coolest guys I ever heard about.

 

I'm glad you got through that.

 

So sad. I respected and envied the guy. He seemed to have one of the great jobs, to enjoy his life... which goes to show how little we can know about other people, even those who are close to us. I have been depressed but never suffered from anything approaching clinical depression. I find it hard to comprehend that he would want to check out of his life, which comes back to not understanding the power of the disease or the mind of another person.

As to suicide, in a general sense I don't approve of it, particularly if you have young children, but my great private horror is the thought of losing my mental faculties to Alzheimers or dementia. I decided long ago that if I realized it was happening to me that I would make my amends and say my goodbyes (perhaps not too overtly), and one sunny morning go sit in a lawn chair, eat a handful of phenobarb and wash them down with a pitcher of screwdrivers. Just go to sleep.

It's a loss to all who enjoyed his work, his friends, his family. RIP.

 

But you do get to stalk a poster across the board and treat them predictably and pathetically on any number of threads because that poster is a female. The way Write Thinking gets treated by a handful of posters around here is cowardly and misogynistic.

 

I was pretty depressed after a breakup in '96 and spent a few days eating 200 McNuggets and sleeping a lot.

I'm pretty sure I'd never kill myself. I can't imagine a world without me in it.

 

Sort of. The disease of mental illness is selfish. There isn't any question about that. The disease deserves no pity. It wants to say all kinds of shit to people, and it wants to be a great, unknowable thing that strikes terror and awe and romance in people. Yes, in some, romance. Annihilation is an impressively canny evocation of its many forms. And sometimes that disease comes on so strong that suicide, in a brief moment, seems not only "not wrong" but right.

Mental illness can be talked about in tough terms so long as we're separating the whole of the person from the disease. Loved ones/supporters have to differentiate between the disease talking and the affected person talking, and they have to be tough - I'd argue uncompromising - with the disease.

One of the most basic things the disease can't stand is a smaller life. It wants you to be overextended and maxed out - the better for you to disappoint someone, somewhere. The disease uses social media. It's brilliant that way. That's why kids who are on it often feel worse and withdrawn. Because the world out there seems so large and fun, and they're not in it. Likewise, Twitter and Facebook. The disease loves to live there.

As for the rich and famous, reality, IMO, is largely this: Many of the rich and famous are addicted to people pleasing and performance. Yeah, they're overpaid. But they work hard. They live to say "yes." (Indeed, not being able to say yes can trigger depression...that's when the "offers/jobs/roles stop coming in." The traits many of them have - obsession over craft, a critical internal soundtrack, narcissism - are most fertile ground for the disease. Most of them, by their very nature, are not "well-adjusted" or "balanced." Imagine thinking you have to enter not just one open door, but four simultaneously, lest you disappoint someone, anyone, but especially all the agents, PAs, and people whose entire economy is...you.

I wouldn't want it. Not even for a little bit. I'll take my small life.

 

Bullshit.

He or she deserves ridicule when they defend pedophiles and talk out their ass.

 

I assume fame and fortune (and everything that goes with it) makes it exponentially more likely that an individual struggling mentally at that level will eventually commit suicide.