Articles about Robin Williams are everywhere, on blogs, news sites, and my Facebook feed. They all say, in short, “he suffered from depression, but he was a comic genius.”
Given the wild manic nature of his comedy, after seeing so many posts/articles, I began to wonder if it wasn’t really depression that he suffered from, but bipolar disorder. And a google search for Robin Williams bipolar turned up this article from psychcentral.com, in which the psychologist author says,
We acknowledge Williams himself has never stated, to our knowledge, that he had been formally diagnosed with bipolar disorder or depression. Yet given his behaviors and symptoms, it seems far more likely he suffered from bipolar disorder — of which depression is a very significant component.
Which makes the constant youtube clips that are out there almost a bit unsettling, to think that (while we don’t really know, and I am hardly an expert) we may have been watching a comedy act that, in some way, was an extension of a mental illness.
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