Robin Williams is dead

Lash wrote:

There are 4 movies he starred/acted in that are yet to be released. Just fyi.

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Mr. Williams hasn’t had a major hit comedy vehicle to his name since the $71 million-grossing RV in 2006.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2014/04/18/mrs-doubtfire-2-should-make-us-sad/

He was creatively dull over the last many years, and had known little other than commercial failure.....I doubt that there were substantial paydays attached to those 4 films. The $2 million for the failed series did little more than pay the tax bill for the ranch for a year, a bill he was not even expecting to need to pay.

8 years without a successful film, in an age when the studios are sucking it in box office and long ago decided to cut the costs of production by cutting the payday to the actors......Williams was mostly done in this business. Looking at BoxOfficoMojo it appears that we need to go all the way back to 1998 to find Williams in the lead of a successful move other than animation (Patch Adams). That was a long long time ago.

On the dark side of comedians

Oh, they have a dark side, I mean, because they're looking at that. In the process of looking for comedy, you have to be deeply honest. And in doing that, you'll find out here's the other side. You'll be looking under the rock occasionally for the laughter. So they have a depressed side. But is it always the sad clown thing? No. But I find comics to be pretty honest people in terms of looking at stuff from both sides, or all sides. ...

I volunteered to be on the cover of a — I think it was Newsweek, for their issue on medication. ... And when the guy said, "Well, do you ever get depressed?" I said, "Yeah, sometimes I get sad." I mean, you can't watch news for more than three seconds and go, "Oh, this is depressing."

And then immediately, all of a sudden, they branded me manic-depressive. I was like, "Um, that's clinical? I'm not that." Do I perform sometimes in a manic style? Yes. Am I manic all the time? No. Do I get sad? Oh, yeah. 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."
http://www.npr.org/2014/08/12/339823090/robin-williams-in-looking-for-laughter-you-have-to-be-deeply-honest

He may not have felt the strength to fight the addiction this time around, and he may have felt it would likely destroy his career, if it didn't kill him first, and again put his family through things he would later regret but never be able to undue. He might have felt they would be better off without him now, and that he was better off not going on until he really hit rock bottom. Starting to use alcohol again might have been the final defeat, the riptide of depression that really pulled him under, and he just gave up while he still had his dignity and reputation left.

In the interview, Williams also opens up about his drinking relapse after 20 years of sobriety, which reportedly played a role in his second divorce.

“One day I walked into a store and saw a little bottle of Jack Daniel’s. And then that voice -- I call it the ‘lower power’ -- goes, ‘Hey. Just a taste. Just one.’ I drank it, and there was that brief moment of ‘Oh, I’m okay!’ But it escalated so quickly. Within a week I was buying so many bottles I sounded like a wind chime walking down the street," he said.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/13/robin-williams_n_3923027.html

Not methods that most people would picked to end their lives if they have the ability to think logically at the time.

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Not methods that most people would picked to end their lives
if they have the ability to think logically at the time.

He was thinking logically enough to chose a sufficiently lethal method.

May he rest in peace. He will always be remembered.

"It's trying to fill the hole, and it's fear," he told Maron of what led him back to drinking. "You're going, 'What am I doing in my career?' You bottom out.... People say, 'You have an Academy Award.' The Academy Award lasted about a week, and then one week later people are going, 'Hey, Mork!'
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-robin-williams-last-days-20140813-story.html#page=1

In recent months — as Williams wrestled with the cancellation of his CBS TV series "The Crazy Ones" and fought to maintain a sobriety that had at times proved fragile — those friends could see that he was losing that fight.

"He started to disconnect," comedian Rick Overton, a friend of Williams' since the 1970s, said Tuesday. "He wasn't returning calls as much. He would send texts and things like that, but they would get shorter and shorter."...

Comedian and longtime friend Steven Pearl ran into Williams at a barbecue last month in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he could see that something was wrong. Williams, who had battled drug and alcohol addiction early in his career, had just come out of a stint in rehab in Minnesota, where he had gone, his publicist said at the time, to "fine-tune and focus on his continued commitment" to his sobriety.

"You could just tell something was off," Pearl said. "He seemed detached. It's hard to explain. He didn't seem like his usual self. My fiancee and I were like, 'Is he OK?' I didn't know it would get this dark."...

In hopes of shoring up his finances and recapturing some of the old "Mork & Mindy" magic, he returned to television last fall with a highly touted starring role in the comedy "The Crazy Ones." CBS had high hopes for the show, on which Williams played an over-the-top Chicago ad man opposite Sarah Michelle Gellar. The gig also provided a steady paycheck — a reported $165,000 per episode — which he candidly admitted he needed....

"The Crazy Ones" started off strong, with more than 15 million tuning in for the Sept. 26 premiere, according to Nielsen. But the reviews were mixed and the audience steadily eroded as the season went on. Production on the series ended in March and was followed by a wrap party at Bugatta Supper Club in Los Angeles. But Williams wasn't able to attend because he was starting work on the film "Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb," the third installment in 20th Century Fox's comedy franchise.

On May 10, CBS announced "The Crazy Ones" wouldn't return for a second season. Friends say the news was a serious emotional blow to Williams, who had spoken of finding himself increasingly prone to bouts of depression ever since undergoing open-heart surgery in 2009.

"He took the cancellation of the show hard," Overton said. "It would hit any of us hard, but especially a heart patient who has depression. The one-two punch of that can make all the difference in the world. He got real quiet. I've known those eyes for decades. I know where the spark is supposed to be."

In late spring, Williams wrapped up work on the latest "Night at the Museum" film — reprising his role as Theodore Roosevelt — and voiced a talking dog in "Absolutely Anything," a sci-fi comedy from former "Monty Python" star Terry Jones. It would be his last professional job.

In early July, Williams checked himself into the Hazelden addiction treatment center in Center City, Minn. He had not fallen off the wagon, his publicist said at the time, but was instead struggling to hold himself together as he crumbled under the weight of depression.

What transpired in the weeks between Williams' return from Hazelden and his death is unknown except to those closest to the actor...
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-robin-williams-last-days-20140813-story.html#page=1

Must you keep pushing your "men's issues" into every post you make? It's more than tiresome; it's cheap.

It's time for us as a society to say "We love our men."
It's time to for us to change our attitudes AND our actions.

Using someone else's tragedy to promote your own agenda

Slow strangulation ?
Very odd. Very ad hoc.

Toxicology report will be very interesting.
Its hard to believe that he cud do that with clean blood.

Now Samaritans has complained about "excessive detail" in some of Wednesday's national newspapers about how Robin Williams took his own life.

"The media has come a long way over the past few years in terms of sensitively reporting suicide (read " self censoring reports of suicide" ) , which is why we are concerned to see that there have been a large number of articles detailing unnecessary information about the nature of Robin Williams' death," it said in a statement.

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Slow strangulation ?
Very odd. Very ad hoc.

Toxicology report will be very interesting.
Its hard to believe that he cud do that with clean blood.

Hanging is a common method of of suicide--in the U.K. it's the most common method, in the U.S. it's the second most common, after firearms.

What Williams did is considered short-drop hanging, or partial hanging.

It's not slow strangulation if done effectively--which involves cutting off the main blood supply to the brain rather than just the airway. Unconsciousness can be achieved in 15 seconds or less, and death after 5 minutes, making it relatively rapid and relatively painless.

Like almost everything else these days, you can find out how to do it on a Web site. Perhaps that is what Williams did.
http://lostallhope.com/suicide-methods/hanging/short-drop/simple-suspension

I realize that the coroner is legally obligated to make public the cause and method of death, but I really would have preferred not to hear all the gory details in this case. I agree with William's wife, we should remember his life, and not the manner of his death. But given the graphic picture the coroner painted, I find that a little hard to do right now. I'm sure I'm not the only one. It's a very disturbing image to be left with.