The Invisible Disease

Robin Williams was an airman, a doctor, a genie, a nanny, a president, a professor, a bangarang Peter Pan, and everything in between. But he was one of a kind. He arrived in our lives as an alien – but he ended up touching every element of the human spirit. He made us laugh. He made us cry. He gave his immeasurable talent freely and generously to those who needed it most – from our troops stationed abroad to the marginalized on our own streets. The Obama family offers our condolences to Robin’s family, his friends, and everyone who found their voice and their verse thanks to Robin Williams.
President Obama

We are biased toward visible disease, how many times have you seen someone park a car in a handicap parking space and thought “why are they parking there” as they walked off. We tend to think of disabilities as people in a wheelchair. We tend to think of a disability as something we can see.

Drug dependency and mental disorders are just as debilitating as a physical disability and many times they go untreated because we can hide our internal demons a lot better than physical disability. Many times they are visible to others but are hidden from ourselves.

I have a friend that denies to this day that she is an alcoholic; she got a DUI conviction because everyone is biased against trans-people. She stumbled down the stairs because of a loose step. Even with treatment it is hard to kick the bottle. Before I retired one of my technicians we sent to rehab every fall and in the spring he would go golfing with his buddies and they would stop at the 19^th hole.

Many times insurance coverage for mental illness just covers the bare minimums or they push antidepressants with their slew of side effects. I remember when I was in grad school for my MSW and the class on psychotropic drugs and many times the professor said, “we think they work this way,” it seemed to me that they found a chemical compound that worked to do what they wanted but they had no idea of how it did it. The lists of side effects for the different drugs were endless.

There is also the stigma with alcoholism and mental illness, we understand physical disabilities, but we still see alcoholism and mental illness as a weakness of character. In reality we know that alcoholism and mental illness has its roots in biological components, some people are predisposed toward alcoholism and mental illnesses. They have fought them all their lives and many have lost their lives to the battle.

Robin Williams has done so many great movies that it hard to pick just one movie, “Moscow on the Hudson” I like because one of my favorite bosses was an immigrant from Romania. He used to tell stories of his coming to America and it paralleled Vladimir Ivanoff journey.



Then another of his movies that was close to my heart was “The World According to Garp”



Terribly Sad