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"It has been two years since Robin Williams died, and his widow, Susan Schneider Williams, continues to work to spread awareness of the brain disease that led to his suicide, Lewy Body Disease.
In a heartbreaking essay titled "The Terrorist Inside My Husband's Brain," Susan writes about her late husband's final few months and how the disease that he didn't know he had consumed his life. Sharing that Robin's many symptoms didn't fit any one diagnosis, Susan explains that he had to deal with not only physical limitations such as heartburn and poor sense of smell but also mental incapacitation.
"By wintertime, problems with paranoia, delusions and looping, insomnia, memory, and high cortisol levels - just to name a few - were settling in hard," she writes. "Psychotherapy and other medical help was becoming a constant in trying to manage and solve these seemingly disparate conditions.""
Full Article:
** Essay ("The Terrorist Inside My Husband's Brain"):
http://www.neurology.org/content/87/13/1308.full
http://www.neurology.org/content/87/13/1308.full.pdf+html
(Score: 4, Informative) by opinionated_science on Sunday October 02 2016, @08:48PM
I modded you up - I have personally had to deal with this both professionally and personally.
As an relevant aside, I saw Robin Williams live in South Carolina a few years ago, and he was every bit as sparkling, spontaneous and witty as I have ever seen via movies, TV etc...
My impression at the time was his handler (a senior exec from film company) was there to give him prompts - not that he couldn't carry off the performance - but to give some direction.
When I heard about his death, I had the distinct feeling that I was very glad to have seen him perform as that will be how *I* remember him.
And there in lies the problem - when it's a family member you just hope you can cling to the memories before clinical degradation causes so much pain.