Suicide in the news: psychiatrist/neuroscientist Dr.Nolan Williams

[LaVieEnRose]

I just came across this news randomly although I had never heard of him. It's terribly sad of course but at the risk of sounding crude I found it noteworthy enough to share here to get everybody's impressions.

Here's an article among many reporting it:

IN MEMORIAM: Nolan R. Williams, MD - Neuropsychopharmacology

www.nature.com

My thoughts:

Physician suicide is nothing extraordinary sadly but you don't have to be possessed of a particularly discerning mind to grasp the irony of a psychiatrist killing himself. Especially since this man apparently was very instrumental and passionate about developing new treatments for depression and other mental illnesses.

Did he try what he developed at all? Did he not believe in them for himself?

As an aside, personally I don't know what it is like to be depressed in conventionally "happy" circumstances.

 

[itsgone2]

This is insane. Read the bio. It's each item is more impressive than my entire career.

And yet he still goes. Even with a wife and kids. It doesn't seem possible.

 

[astr4]

there are people out there with everything you've ever dreamed of having but are still miserable and suicidal for one reason or another. it's always really jarring to me.

i think death haunts some of us no matter what we do, and it calls for us from the other side. l'appel du vide. i guess that's what they call depression.

people like anthony bourdain or kim jonghyun or this guy, they all seem so successful and they can't even be happy and want to be alive? damn. what hope is there for me? i don't have any of that going for me… seems i'm destined to die too.

 

[madwoman]

Even though I don't want to go in depth why I want to CTB to the people that know me (I plan to leave a overall basic reason without major details which I haven't even scratched the surface on here) but I'm so curious after someone commits about hearing the details of why and how they truly felt. Some of the things he had are some of the many reasons I want to go - success, helping others in a big way/leaving an impact, having adventurous hobbies which I can only picture happy full of life people doing, and a partner (and family I don't want kids but he had that). I know there's so much to a person and depression is brain chemistry too and all and at the end of the day we don't know what we all really battle but it's just hard to imagine people CTB when they seem to have a good life. I don't know if anyone would think any of that for me, but idk so much to think about. We are all human and have to live our life being who we are and sometimes we just can't anymore.

 

[U. A.]

there are people out there with everything you've ever dreamed of having but are still miserable and suicidal for one reason or another.

There's this one-panel comic of something like a Buddhist monk being hovered over by an unhappy-looking waitstaff at a restaurant, smiling, with the text below indicating him saying "Change comes from within"...

This imo is what's misguided about a pretty significant number of people's ideas of living well (and inherently escaping suicide drive). Articulating the degree to which this is applicable is beyond my sleep-deprived brain—whether it's only really for people who feel like "failures" and/or lack of fulfillment derived from social approval, or all the way to people with intractable, debilitating chronic illness—but generally the pursuit of "getting" leads nowhere, especially not to fulfillment. The problem isn't that you are not getting or don't have something, but that you want it (and no I'm not talking about physiological needs like sustenance and fundamental affection/intimacy [the absence of the latter of which tend to sting worse when absent in formative years]) because as we all know, even after you eat you get hungry again. After you drink you get thirsty again. After you sleep you get tired again.

BPD may be an example of how it is the nature of the feeling of need for validation that is the issue, rather than the presence or absence of validation itself (conjecture, but speaking to something many here seem to experience).

 

[socksnsandles]

for all we know he could have been dealing with a shit ton of health problems

 

[BlueberryDeer]

I think no one is inmune to suicidal thoughts. Whatever if someone do it or not, it depends of the circumstances.
Resolving the inner void(S) varies from person to person, country by country, economic context, gender context, and so on.
Perhaps this doctor have some voids that he was ashamed to talk about it because he was supposed to be a kind of authority to figure it out.

 

[cowboypants]

It's a sad news, and he seemed to have worked in Stanford so must be really good. That aside, Neuroscience as a field is said to be the youngest of sciences. So we have a long way to go indeed