This Is A Debut...: Mental Illness and Robin Williams.

It is difficult to describe mental illness, it has always felt to me that there is simply no vocabulary wide enough to explain what it is, what it does and who it forces you to become. Even as someone who has been consumed by it, by depression, as someone who knows what it is to have it take over all you are I find it hard to make others understand. How do you explain the feeling of being lost and drowning in a black and endless ocean, feeling as though the air is being stolen away from you and day after day you have to fight just to breathe? To feel so sad, so alone, so listless and lost. At times to feel hateful and angry without being able to explain why. To feel so tired and beaten by something you can't see or touch. And in the midst of that as you slowly give up to be surrounded by people who do not carry that burden, people who walk without that weight.

Nobody suffers it quite the same, or bears the load the same way and because of the stigma attached to mental illness it is impossible to open up and talk about it. And even if you can and do, talking is not always the answer. Sometimes no counsellor, no voice, no pill can cure it. It grows like a cancer of the mind and for some it absolutely is terminal, no way out. There is no exit. There is just the end of everything. A final moment where the darkest of the thoughts tell you that the world and those you love within it are better without you. Until you know that pain how can you understand? How can you explain? How can you fix such a deep, aching pain? It is so clear that more time, money and education need to be put into awareness of mental illness and helping those burdened combat it.
Since reading about the death of the incredible Robin Williams it is even clearer that we need to take the stigma away. There is no shame in mental illness. Just as there is no shame in cancer or diabetes.

So many comments today have questioned how a man laden with so much wealth and fame could feel that way and of course, that is exactly where the lack of understanding lies.

Mental illness can affect anyone, anywhere at any point. It has no magic trigger. It just doesn't work that way. It is incredibly complex. The truth is, sometimes it doesn’t matter what you have or don’t have, mental illness doesn’t care.

And how heart-breaking it truly is, how heart-breaking that a man, an astronomically talented and funny man, who through his mediums of film and comedy could bring such joy to so many and yet his own spirit, his own soul, was so torn and so broken by the darkness of depression. How heart-breaking that depression can rip away such a beautiful soul.

Remember this, even the brightest of stars can be lost in the darkness and burn out, what a tragedy that is, that such beauty can be lost and sometimes there is just no way to save it and instead of questioning why the star felt so lost, why it "allowed" itself to get so carried away, know that, it didn't, it just couldn't fight anymore and ask how you can save the next star.

We are all stars and all of our brightness and our beauty can be taken from us and it will keep happening, we will lose our stars until we change the way we look at the darkness that takes them. Until we take away the shame and replace that with hope.