The recent death by suicide of Hollywood actor and comedian Robin Williams, who was said to be suffering from major depression, has once again highlighted the nature of the insidious disease and the need for proper psychiatric treatment of the ailment. Robin Williams was not the first celebrity victim of major depression to have committed suicide. The list is a long one including celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and possibly even Michael Jackson, besides others. The point to be underscored is that suicide is one of the most sinister side effects of major or untreated depression. According to medical researchers, patients with major depression are at least 15 times more vulnerable to committing suicide than healthy individuals. It should be noted here that we are talking about major depression that is not treated properly and not the ordinary garden variety of the ‘blues’ from which most of us suffer from time to time and which, mercifully, goes away by itself.
Major depression is a disease that cuts across all segments and strata of society, and thus leaves nobody immune. I am certain that for every celebrity about whom we hear, there must be a corresponding number of faceless and nameless individuals who also fall prey to this debilitating disease and end up extinguishing their own lives. According to some researchers, there does, however, seem to be a tendency amongst creative people to fall prey to depression more easily. It is, perhaps, their sensitive nature that makes them feel this more strongly than other people, thus making them more susceptible to depression. Even in the subcontinent, well known performers like Guru Dutt from Bollywood and Pakistan’s famous comedian Khawar Salim, alias Nana, committed suicide because they could not deal with their depression.
Talking about our own society, depression is considered to be a social stigma or some kind of moral weakness and is thus kept under wraps and not treated properly. It has to be understood that depression, like any other chronic physical disease like diabetes, is a serious mental illness in which a chemical imbalance takes place in the brain. Like most diseases, depression is also a progressive disease that should be treated aggressively by a qualified psychiatrist. It is commonly seen that psychiatric illness is not taken seriously in our country. Emotionally challenged patients are usually taken to fake pirs and faith healers. As result of this bogus faith healing and lack of proper treatment, the patient’s disease gets worse, usually resulting in madness or suicide by the patient. The worst thing about depression is that it gradually saps life and hope out of its victim. And the only alternative the patients finds available to himself/herself to relieve them of their torment is suicide.
Depression, like any other major mental state, has to be taken seriously and help has to be sought from a qualified psychiatrist. Psychiatric treatment usually consists of the use of psycho-tropical drugs and some type of psychotherapy. With the advent of modern drugs, a patient of depression is usually able to resume normal life fairly quickly. Psychiatric treatment is unfortunately both protracted and expensive, therefore a majority of our poor people cannot sustain it and thus the probability of relapse becomes quite high.
Our government should play its role in subsidising psychiatric treatment in some form or the other. This expenditure incurred by the government would be well spent because a depressed patient is only an unproductive member of society. It is only with proper and complete treatment of psychiatric patients that we can covert them into useful and productive members for our society from the liabilities that they are at present.
Lastly, I would like to very strongly dispel the erroneous concept prevalent in our conservative society that it is only people with weak faith who get depressed. It has to be emphasised that even very religious people are not immune to depression. They can also be affected by depression, the way they can fall victim to other ailments like typhoid or hypertension. If patients of depression want to get some kind of religious or faith-based help, it should be in addition to proper psychiatric treatment and not as a substitute for such a treatment.
The writer is a freelance columnist