[Brazelton] Robin Williams Dead at 63

I wasn't able to find anything where they have directly worked together, but I'm sure they would've crossed paths at some point. Both of their careers took off at about the same time (1979) so I assume their respective reputations for being "the zany guy" both orbited each other to some degree. Maybe not any sort of actual relationship, but at least a kinship. And so I thought that Al would have something to say. Observation, remembrance, whatever.

--Patrick
 
Conan O'Brian remembers Robin Williams.


The cast of Broadway's hit show "Aladdin" created their own tribute. James Monroe Iglehart, who won a Tony Award as the Genie, led the crowd at the New Amsterdam Theatre on Tuesday in a rousing version of "Friend Like Me" after the curtain went down. The show's Playbills had been stuffed with the song's lyrics and everyone was encouraged to sing along. (via AP)

 
By the way, for anyone who has Disney XD, they'll be showing Aladdin today at 11 A.M. and 7:30 PM. These screenings will be without commercial interruption, if they're anything like the Disney channel screening I stumbled across last night.
 
By the way, for anyone who has Disney XD, they'll be showing Aladdin today at 11 A.M. and 7:30 PM. These screenings will be without commercial interruption, if they're anything like the Disney channel screening I stumbled across last night.
I hope they aren't sped-up/edited like I've seen them do movies on the regular Disney channel.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
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Marc Maron re-released his interview with Robin. It's such a rare experience to hear Robin talking candidly and openly about his life without that exaggerated frenetic energy which accompanies him in all the tv interviews I've seen him in. It's funny, sad, and wonderful to hear.
 
While the sentiment is genuine, does it bother anyone else that he (they) could not help themselves from plugging their wares? It's a statement about the death of a great man, and it most certainly could have been expressed as just "Mork & Mindy" & "Aladdin" without the shameless branding plug.
 
While the sentiment is genuine, does it bother anyone else that he (they) could not help themselves from plugging their wares?
I think it's hugely ironic considering there was all that animosity between Williams and Disney, and he had his name removed from all Aladdin merchandise. (I have a nice making-of book somewhere and he's referred to only as "the Genie.")

People using the Genie "you're free" image especially get my goat because Robin Williams isn't "free" to go to Disneyland or whatever. It's such a cloying, romanticized view of suicide and it gets my goat every time. (Luckily I have a lot of goats.)


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People using the Genie "you're free" image especially get my goat because Robin Williams isn't "free" to go to Disneyland or whatever. It's such a cloying, romanticized view of suicide and it gets my goat every time. (Luckily I have a lot of goats.)
I would like to apologize to you, then, ZenMonkey, for when I had used the image earlier in this thread. I had not meant for any connotations like that in relation to suicide. I had chosen the image simply to go along with my sentiment for how I will miss Robin Williams and the impact that he had made for me and my father. I'm sorry if I am among the many to have gotten your goat that way. I did not mean to.
 
Aww. Now I feel bad; I didn't even see your use of it. It was more the barrage on Twitter and Tumblr that annoyed me. Lazy image reposting without any thought. I'm on my phone so can't search too well, but I'm sure your post was far more articulate.


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Aww. Now I feel bad; I didn't even see your use of it. It was more the barrage on Twitter and Tumblr that annoyed me. Lazy image reposting without any thought. I'm on my phone so can't search too well, but I'm sure your post was far more articulate.


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Don't worry about it. I can understand how it could annoy someone, seeing Twitter and Tumblr just spamming the same message instead of people voicing their individual stories in a more articulate manner.
 
I choose to believe that robin williams did not die but finally released his true pure energy form from his meaty chrysalis.
 
I think it's hugely ironic considering there was all that animosity between Williams and Disney, and he had his name removed from all Aladdin merchandise. (I have a nice making-of book somewhere and he's referred to only as "the Genie.")
To be fair, he did return for the third movie. Though I recall he once called is contract with Disney as "the contract from Hell." Apparently, when you sign with Disney, you don't just sign for one movie. You sign for several, some being mandatory. That's apparently how he got stuck doing, say, Flubber.

EDIT: I just spent a few minutes trying to find anything on this apparently contract from Hell. All I found was a post I made in the Movies thread about Flubber. I swear I heard it somewhere, but maybe it was just from a friend that was full of shit. Anyone ever heard about this?
 
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After reading some of the writeups on Parkinsons medications, I think I may know what happened.

One of the meds that is tried first, Dopamine Agonists, has a couple of very nasty side effects: insomnia, confusion and hallucinations.

Put two and two together, and... ouch.
 
To be fair, he did return for the third movie. Though I recall he once called is contract with Disney as "the contract from Hell." Apparently, when you sign with Disney, you don't just sign for one movie. You sign for several, some being mandatory. That's apparently how he got stuck doing, say, Flubber.

EDIT: I just spent a few minutes trying to find anything on this apparently contract from Hell. All I found was a post I made in the Movies thread about Flubber. I swear I heard it somewhere, but maybe it was just from a friend that was full of shit. Anyone ever heard about this?
I don't have a source to link to, but you are correct about the multi-commitment contract. Disney isn't the only studio to do this, but when it comes to their contracts, they don't screw around.
 
After reading some of the writeups on Parkinsons medications, I think I may know what happened.
I've also seen alimony troubles and abortion (?) tossed around as reasons for his suicide. As if struggling with your sobriety and severe clinical depression after being told you have an illness that's likely going to fuck you up for the rest of your life weren't enough. I am phenomenally lucky enough not to have struggled with drug or alcohol addictions, but I can say with certainty from my own experience that the news (and possibly symptoms) of his diagnosis didn't necessarily require another agonist to make him fatally suicidal. And in my own opinion -- flame away -- all the speculation is unnecessary and rather disrespectful.
 
Imagine you have been having issues with addiction and mental health issues for most of your life. Then, you discover you have an illness that requires you to take medication to reduce its effects. The doctor tells you about the side effects: insomnia, disorientation, and possible hallucinations.

What I'm suggesting is that his death should be classified as suicide under the influence. The same way that someone on a trip of LSD decides to jump off a bridge because they think they're invincible.
 
I suffer from depression, and have had suicidal experiences. There is a dark part of me, when I read about things like this, that thinks I'll simply never outrun it. Perhaps suicide is my end, whether tomorrow or when I'm 63, or 97.
 

Cajungal

Staff member
I read something about that today--how news about suicide affects people with suicidal thoughts. It must be difficult to be reminded that it's always a battle. :-/
 
His toxicology report will help them determine that.

But to be pedantic, in the same way no one dies of cancer (it's heart failure, liver failure, etc) there is no "suicide" or "under the influence" in the examiners report. They don't suppose a why, only a how.

The actual cause of death is "asphyxiation." The police investigation may say, "Self inflicted." There is nothing beyond that, unless an outside party (family, usually) starts their own investigation and subsequently sues anyone they believe is partly responsible for his death - and perhaps at this point the courts can decide whether the drug is to blame, and then you might have an "under the influence" ruling.

It may also be that once the toxicology report is done, then it will trigger a report to the FDA or CDC based on what else was in his system. This is how some drug interaction effects are discovered or measured.

Until either of those things happens, though, we can do nothing more than speculate.

As far as the validity of speculation, it may be impolite or offensive, but this is how humans grow and learn - if something bad or scary happens you can either run away and ignore it, living in fear of it, or you can pry it apart and find out why so you can avoid the same fate. We've evolved for this sort of discovery - those who seek to understand and learn from their understanding have a better chance at reproducing.

Then there's those of us who just reproduce willy-nilly regardless. :awesome:
Well said, Steinman.

I'd also like to use this post as a springboard for an impromptu "ask me anything" about mental illness. I'm heavily involved in figuring out the biological basis of depression; I feel that things are less scary the more we know about them, and because explaining how we might be able to 'figure out' depression helps me cope with Mr. Williams' loss.

Cheers.
 
While the sentiment is genuine, does it bother anyone else that he (they) could not help themselves from plugging their wares? It's a statement about the death of a great man, and it most certainly could have been expressed as just "Mork & Mindy" & "Aladdin" without the shameless branding plug.
It bothers me that it felt "boilerplate," mainly.

--Patrick
 
Well said, Steinman.

I'd also like to use this post as a springboard for an impromptu "ask me anything" about mental illness. I'm heavily involved in figuring out the biological basis of depression; I feel that things are less scary the more we know about them, and because explaining how we might be able to 'figure out' depression helps me cope with Mr. Williams' loss.

Cheers.
How far away are we from a cure for depression?
 
How far away are we from a cure for depression?
We are pretty far, unfortunately. This is, largely, due to the fact that depression is an extremely complex illness and we're still trying to figure out the "nuts and bolts" of the disorder.

Take something like Huntington's disease: it's caused by a single gene, and it's entirely genetic. Depression, on the other hand, is not entirely genetic. It has both genetic causes (studies using siblings/twins have shown there's about a ~40% rate of inheritance of depression) but also experience-dependent causes, primarily long-term stress (link, if you're interested: http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-living/stress-management/expert-answers/stress/faq-20058233). Even the genetic causes are murky, because different parts of your brain do different things and have different patterns of genes to identify. To help clarify why this can be a big deal, one gene goes UP in the amygdala (controls fear/emotion) but DOWN in the prefrontal cortex (controls the stress response/some higher functions) in patients with depression. Considering that our genes are what dictate our biochemistry, that our biochemistry is altered in depression, and that drugs act by altering our biochemistry, understanding the genetics behind depression is a big deal.

In a nutshell, this is all important because to design treatments to cure depression we need to understand the biological basis for it. Until then, we might get lucky with some drug treatments (such as serotonin reuptake inhibitors), but we're kind of grasping blindly.

Part of the reason we're still so in the dark is because research on depression is SHIT compared to other illnesses. Forgive the rant, but it infuriates me that--despite the fact that depression is the #2 leading cause of disability worldwide (Source) and the #1 leading cause of disability in people aged 14-44 (Source) it is woefully underfunded. To give an example: depression is over a hundred times more prevalent than AIDS and, factoring in disability, results in eight times more years of life lost (Source). In spite of this, it receives less than 12% of the funding that AIDS does.

Personal anger aside...I think it's important to keep several things in mind. The first is that biology is finally starting to implement computational approaches, and I think we're poised on the cusp of a golden age for medicine. What this computational approach means is that, instead of examining only one gene/cell/etc at a time, we're getting much more high-throughput methods. My own research, for instance, focuses on looking at how each of ~25,000 genes varies in the prefrontal cortex in depression--something that would have been unthinkable even ten years ago! So we should be getting much faster and more efficient at identifying the biological roots of depression and, hence, figuring out what to 'attack' in developing new treatment strategies. It sucks how slow science can be sometimes, but I think it's important to remember that we only discovered the structure of DNA--and that it carried genetic information--sixty years ago. Imagine what the next sixty will give us.

And, if I explained anything badly, please feel free to ask me to clarify.
 
Wbiology is finally starting to implement computational approaches, and I think we're poised on the cusp of a golden age for medicine. What this computational approach means is that, instead of examining only one gene/cell/etc at a time, we're getting much more high-throughput methods.
Programmers often learn by taking working code, making tiny changes to it, then recompiling it to see what happens. Leaving the (SUBSTANTIAL!) ethical considerations aside for the moment, engineering retrovirii to reprogram DNA in itself sounds like a daunting enough challenge.

--Patrick
 
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fade

Staff member
If it makes you feel any better, it's hard for physicists and engineers to sell computational methods to customers as well. Well, except in mechanics, where people are cool with it because it follows logically. I do computational physics for a living, and it can be really difficult to convince oil companies that this code with a runtime of weeks is as valuable as Jim the Experienced Geologist down the hall who can look at the same data and do similar things in his head based on experience.
 
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