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“But there is stupidity.”

Yes there is and your displaying it. You don’t quit and you don’t walk away from your children and your family. The old timers such as my grand Father and Grand Mother would laugh at what people consider hardships today. Get on a buck board wagon and go from Salinas Kansas to Breckenridge Texas, find a job and make enough money to go back and get the rest of the family and head back in that same buckboard. Grand Mother would ride 15 miles into town on a buckboard to sell egg’s and butter while Grand Dad was working cows on a piece of property they sweat blood to buy.

A few years later my Grand Father was killed while working cows and my Grand Mother took on the ranch by herself. They faced hardships we couldn’t imagine but they didn’t quit and they didn’t bail out. Pop’s 93, lost my Mother when she was 86, he turned the operation over to me about 20 years ago. This ranch will stay in the family or I will die trying, I’ll never quit and I’ll never check out until the Good Lord calls me. My girls are the next in line and my oldest is just like her Great Grandmother.

Never call someone stupid when you don’t know how to use the word “you’re”.

My parents went through far worse than anything your family has and did not commit suicide. That fact has nothing to do with the point of all of this. All of this is anecdotal.

The point is that genetic studies have proven there is a link between genetics and major depression. Therefore, it is a disease, by any definition. Criticizing Williams or anyone else who commits suicide is cold and thoughtless.

One of my closest friends used to feel the way you do because his mother committed suicide when he was ten. He hated her guts for 40 years. A couple of years ago, he suffered a mental breakdown and ended up in a mental hospital.

He is better now and he is no longer angry at his mother. He understands, now. Hopefully, you will understand someday.

With all due respect, you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Congratulations on having a family made of sterner stuff than I, but this in no way negates the struggles of others.

I’m fully well aware that others face far greater challenges and obstacles that I do, but not only does this not help, it actively makes things worse a lot of the time. It leads to even greater panic over why and how I’m so completely messed up that I can’t handle even relatively small issues while others can overcome the greatest hurdles without breaking a sweat.

I have to remind myself on a near-daily basis why suicide is a bad idea and why I shouldn’t do it. But try to understand, there are many, many times when not only do I not think it would be bad for my children, it would be actively good, as they’d have a whole lot more money and wouldn’t have to deal with my problems anymore. It’s very easy - VERY easy - to think that ending it all would solve infinitely more problems than it would create.

Now, don’t get the wrong idea. The chances that I’m going to kill myself today or tomorrow or anytime in the near future are very small, and I absolutely don’t seek or want anybody’s pity. Just that people understand that it’s not “cowardly” and that it’s not anything that people contemplate lightly. It’s a tremendous and sometimes all consuming struggle.

I feel like I know exactly why Robin Williams did what he did and why other unfortunate souls destroy themselves every day. It’s a hell of a way to live and I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy.

I experience through many years of severe depression, it seems to run in my mother’s family and it doesn’t have much to do with enduring hardship. At that time, it wouldn’t have mattered to me if you put me in the Hanoi Hilton or in a mansion with servants catering to my every whim. Heaven and Hell? Either one seemed preferable to having a mind that can’t seem to stop battling with itself. And I don’t mean a mind “battling against itself” as in conscious battle of the will, I mean it more like a machine that’s malfunctioning, continuously struggling against itself to perform it’s intended task. Most people who haven’t been through depression seem to think that a deeply depressed person is just feeling sad, but in my case most of the time I was struggling to feel anything at all.

“You don’t quit and you don’t walk away from your children and your family.”

How do you know they didn’t quit and walk away from him? Plenty of people will, many people can’t get away fast enough. It’s happened to me many times, and it came to a point that I had to just give up and walk away from my mother, she had been talking about committing suicide for most of my life, and it had put my near my own breaking point. Getting away from a bad situation didn’t cure my own depression and frankly I was worried as hell she’d actually go through with it, but thank God, it ended up helping both of us in the long run.