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Robin Williams’ death shows depression’s reach, experts say

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Robin Williams was a rich, talented and beloved superstar who had no problem holding up his demons for public inspection. He joked onstage about his cocaine addiction and spoke with many interviewers about his alcoholism, relapses and mental health.

“Do I get sad? Oh, yeah,” he told public radio host Terry Gross in 2006. “Does it hit me hard? Oh, yeah … I get bummed, like I think a lot of us do at certain times. You look at the world and go, ‘Whoa.’ And then other moments, you look and go, ‘Oh. Things are OK.'”

Despite his success and self-knowledge, Williams apparently couldn’t shake his depression, committing suicide Monday in his California home. His death came as a shock to many fans, but experts said it was a reminder that mental illness does not spare the accomplished.

“Even though someone may have been successful, they don’t see it that way when they’re depressed,” said Michael Young, a psychologist at the Illinois Institute of Technology. “They don’t see their achievements as being meaningful.”

The causes of depression are not well understood, though genetics, brain chemistry and personal circumstances all appear to play a role. The illness is defined as a constellation of symptoms, from a sense of hopelessness to the inability to sleep, that loom over a person for a minimum of two weeks.

Young said depression is a chronic condition only for a small portion of people; for most, it comes and goes. That can disguise the struggles a well-known person might have with the illness, he said.

“People can be really productive and then fall into depression,” he said. “You won’t see them for a year or two, and then they’ll come back. It can be that success comes in episodes and depression does too, but the public doesn’t see that.”

Though depression generally first strikes in a person’s teens or 20s, it can hang on for decades. William Styron, the late author of “Sophie’s Choice” and “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” wrote that for most of his life he was able to control his symptoms with booze. But at the age of 60, when Styron was one of America’s most celebrated writers, depression struck with a vengeance.

“The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come — not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute,” Styron wrote in “Darkness Visible,” his 1990 memoir of battling the illness. ” … One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.”

While fame is no insulator from depression, neither is wealth. Poverty has been associated with a higher prevalence of the illness, but some recent research has suggested that affluent teens could be even more susceptible than their less fortunate peers.

Arizona State University psychology professor Suniya Luthar said that’s because of the demands wealthy children face to be high achievers — demands that don’t stop when they reach adulthood.

“It’s not as though once we pass adolescence, we’re no longer prey to these pressures,” she said. “If anything, it’s more so. If I have been able to maintain a certain lifestyle for my children, I can’t take a step back and say we’re moving from a seven-bedroom house to a two-bedroom house.”

When it comes to recovery, affluent people might have readier access to therapists and medication, but that is no guarantee of success, said Dr. Laura Parise, an addiction psychiatrist with NorthShore University HealthSystem.

“People who seek treatment, no matter at what level, have underlying problems that they don’t have the coping skills for,” she said. “If you have a propensity toward addiction or mental illness, you tend to seek out very unhealthy coping mechanisms.”

Williams spoke in recent years about his devotion to 12-step meetings, and in early July, People magazine reported that one of his representatives said Williams had checked into a treatment center to “fine-tune and focus on his continued commitment” to sobriety.

After Williams’ death, a representative said only that the comedian had been “battling severe depression of late.”

Parise said recovering from depression and addiction — which often occur together — can take a lifetime.

“Some people embrace it right away and maintain that connection,” she said. “Some people go in and out, where they maintain it successfully for some period of time, and relapses are fewer and farther in between. Other people, it takes them a lot longer. They’re still in the process.”

Williams’ line of work lent extra pathos to his death — “What makes his death so difficult to understand is the question, ‘How can someone so funny be so sad?'” director Barry Levinson wrote in a remembrance — but while the tormented comedian is a well-worn cultural icon, Andrew Alexander, co-owner and executive producer of The Second City improv theater, said it’s not accurate across the board.

“It would be unfair to say that people in the comedy world (suffer more from depression),” he said. “I’ve met a lot of people in the business, a lot of them pretty stable and not having those kinds of issues.”

That said, he acknowledged that many people are good at hiding their problems.

“What happens with this disease is there’s a lot of secrecy, so you just don’t know for sure,” he said.

jkeilman@tribune.com

Twitter @JohnKeilman