Heartbreaking. I was a fan.

It's easy to figure out. The fellow must have been taking Prozac or something for recreational purposes. He is unlikely to have been depressed though, fo it is well known that depressed people don't kill themselves. They have to take some pills to be able to do that.

very true, psykotrix. it was also his psychiatrist's fault and Big Pharma's fault in general. in fact, they're to blame for everything--even cancer.

It's very sad.

This is tragic news, and again highlights the need to look into men and depression/suicide from age 45 and older.

It is always the ones with "so much to live for" who do it. Here where I am in Australia recently a locally famous actor on our medical drama All Saints committed suicide - Mark Priestley - which I just blogged about recently actually. And not that long ago one of our newsreaders, Charmaine Dragun, jumped off The Gap, a famous cliff for suicides in Sydney.
Or atleast its the ones with so much to live for that get reported in the paper when they do it...

It is sad, and yet with ignorant folks like psykotrix and aaron around, not incomprehensible. We are all responsible for how we treat each other, cruelty, sarcasm and brutality do more psychic harm than so called depression or even prozac. To blame human suffering solely on the internal workings of the individual's brain is to deny all personal responsibility, all that is moral and decent. Wallace was a talented man, my sympathy goes out to his family and I hope he rests in peace.

As Wallace wrote:

"It is worth considering the strange media landscape in which political talk radio is a salient. Never before have there been so many different national news sources—different now in terms of both medium and ideology. Major newspapers from anywhere are available online; there are the broadcast networks plus public TV, cable's CNN, Fox News, CNBC, et al., print and Web magazines, Internet bulletin boards, The Daily Show, e-mail newsletters, blogs. All this is well known; it's part of the Media Environment we live in. But there are prices and ironies here. One is that the increasing control of U.S. mass media by a mere handful of corporations has—rather counterintuitively—created a situation of extreme fragmentation, a kaleidoscope of information options. Another is that the ever increasing number of ideological news outlets creates precisely the kind of relativism that cultural conservatives decry, a kind of epistemic free-for-all in which "the truth" is wholly a matter of perspective and agenda. In some respects all this variety is probably good, productive of difference and dialogue and so on. But it can also be confusing and stressful for the average citizen. Short of signing on to a particular mass ideology and patronizing only those partisan news sources that ratify what you want to believe, it is increasingly hard to determine which sources to pay attention to and how exactly to distinguish real information from spin. " http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200504/wallace

"...it is increasingly hard to determine which sources to pay attention to and how exactly to distinguish real information from spin. "

Fitting quote now please excuse the mess, my head asploded.

welcome new commenters! who anticipate the furious seasons precepts!

Flawed Plan:

where have you been of late? Always appreciate your comments, even when we disagree.

therapyfirst

After reading your post and the comments, I have to say that you are one of those great, true men. Thanks for being you, Phillip. Stand tall among all these people and their opinions. Here's to making that $3,000 mark...built on compassion and knowledge. :)

Surely you aren't serious? I never wonder about why someone has killed him/herself; just why so many of us stay alive.

Hey therapyfirst, thanks for the shout-out. Where've I been? My summer reading project on genocide has become an unending obsession and some sort of spiritual awakening. I've been neglecting everything while my heart is in Rwanda. Sometimes I wonder how I'll make it back.

Here's the latest from the NYTimes: "James Wallace said that last year his son had begun suffering side effects from the drugs and, at a doctor’s suggestion, had gone off the medication in June 2007. The depression returned, however, and no other treatment was successful. The elder Wallaces had seen their son in August, he said.

“He was being very heavily medicated,” he said. “He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/books/15wallace.html?ref=books

Some of us are going to think the treatment killed him, some the "disease".

Amazing commencement speech from '05 by DFW:

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005

"This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger."

How awful to think he'd been treated for twenty years and then a doctor suggested he come off? Hmm, that doesn't sound all that credible and I doubt he was given very good advice on coming off. Just go over to Gianna Kali's blog Beyond Meds to find out what it's like to come off after twenty years. No easy job and you need to be carefully alerted to all sorts of things. It could wreak havoc on someone who didn't understand what was happening. So yeah, I think I would tend to fall into the camp that believes the treatment killed him, not the disease. The Dad seems to think the treatment made him productive. Well he did write some great stuff so we'll never know what it would have been like without the pills. It's kind of good to know in a funny way that pills cannot quash great genius and creativity completely. May he rest in peace. I'm so sorry another great artist had to go in this way.

Why must every single suicide be blamed on antidepressants? Believe it or not, suicide has been around for a while and will continue to stay (with or without dreaded psychiatric treatment).

We can mourn his passing without immediately looking for some scapegoat. There does not be a "sufficient" reason for someone to commit suicide.

Every suicide certainly isn't blamed on antidepressants. It's just that a considerable number of people are on SSRIs and there's clearly a problem with SSRIs and suicidality.