RIP to an actor who was not defined by his disability in the show, but also at age 16 managed to hold his own against veteran actors dean norris, bryan cranston, aaron paul, and betsy brandt.
A reminder to everyone here: Even when you can’t see a way forward, one can still emerge. Stay. Reach out. You don’t have to face the darkest moments alone.
What is the way forward? When people are staring down the barrel of being completely broke, in debt, facing homelessness, malnutrition, deteriorating quality of life until they ultimately die, what is going to emerge except some black swan of event of pure luck that gets you back to a bearable life? Just telling people it gets better doesn’t help, you must help them.
“People with cerebral palsy experience mental health conditions and psychiatric disorders at significantly higher rates than the general population.”
I’m hard pressed to blame this solely on his financial situations. Cerebral palsy changes the brain. It might be that he had another underlying mental illness that he was afraid to talk about because of the stigma. I mean, this is just guessing, but a lot of people live through our situations without dying by suicide.
I’m a three times suicide survivor and I can tell you it wasn’t anything financial just something that took over my body
What’s the perspective? Because it’s seems like it’s always some variation of “it could be worse”. Like yea there’s probably a lower circle of hell you could be burning in but you’re still in hell with no way out.
As someone currently struggling in a somewhat similar situation to that book, what gets me through the day is unbridled hate towards the system and an overriding desire to see justice
If it’s so bad and you can’t see any way out and you are hours from killing yourself then I’ve heard that the nuclear option of getting addicted to heroin is a great way to stay alive. All your problems melt away to be replaced by one problem of getting the next high.
I’ve attempted suicide three times. Here’s the tip I give people who I encounter these days who have a severe mental illness.
The thing that stopped me from attempting again was 15 years ago I finally realized that no one knows what happens after you die. So I couldn’t really say for sure whether they’re dying by suicide would lead me in a better situation.
Fuck that other person. I'm sorry you have to deal with idiots like that here.
I can't imagine what you're going through but just know that you matter and that the world is a better place with you in it. I hope you are doing better and you get the help you need.
I'm really sorry you have gone through that. I have been pretty deeply depressed a couple times in past, to the point of considering suicide. What I share with people is that in those periods, it truly felt like things weren't going to get better and I was just going to be in emotional pain indefinitely.
But gradually, things got better in my life. I have had so much joy in the 20 years since. I still have bad days sometimes, but on the whole, I feel such a sense of gratitude.
I can't promise anyone that their own situation will get better. I can only say that my experience is that it is possible.
I'm so sorry. I'm glad you are here and are sharing this with folks like me. I lost my child, mom, and wife, all back to back in accidents. I really have lost all the will to live. Like... I have made peace with everything tbh! I did think about everything, but I couldn't do it because of dad. And then at a point we both thought about it ending it all, but eventually I found my support system with my friends. Support system + meds + therapy... are helping me keep functioning these days. Reaching out is the first step.
And I try think about this the same way about my birth. I really cannot say what it was like before... So death is kind of the same. But the 'inbetween' matters. At least it mattered in my case. For now, it helps to live just by the day and not think beyond it.
If anyone is reading this and is in a dark place please know that things can be better with the right support and help.
I guess Noaidi, me, and other folks here are proof that it all works.
I just read your blog post and my heart is with you. Seriously. You are a strong soul. What else can be said. Nothing will make it better. We are here to suffer, for an unknown purpose. Only faith in the divine gives me hope in those moments. And I hope that one day life will make more sense
Thank you for taking the time and the kind words. I don't know if I'm strong, but I'm just a man trying hard to accept whatever nature throws at me. Even after losing my child and mom, I had faith in life, thanks to my wife, but I don't know what it means anymore. We're all just a big bag of weird cosmic anachronisms in this vast cold universe. The only faith I have is that we are all connected in a way and in that sense, the ones I lost are still with me.
I personally think they still exist somewhere. Someone who was my only family died suddenly last year and it was the worst thing I could imagine happening. I still feel like he communicates with me sometimes (probably an unpopular opinion on this techy forum). I think life is supposed to be brutal sometimes but there is always hope somehow even if there’s temporarily no hope in the human realm I try to have faith that there is hope if I could see everything from the divine view.
I'm sorry for your loss. And thanks for sharing this. I'm an atheist myself but I can totally relate to the phenomenon. I still talk to my mom and wife all the time. I look at consciousness thru the lens of panpsychism and I believe we're connected. Maybe it is the mind's defense mechanism or something we don't understand yet, but it's the only solace I have.
Thanks. Peace, yes, that is the key. A very radical acceptance that everything is impermanent.
It works, for sure, and I need to be more vocal about my survival and how I did, and still do it. Thank you again, and I am glad you came out of all of that with such great insight. _/\_
Reach out? Towards what mysterious force is one to reach out to?
Call 988, get sent to spend some time off of work while locked up with others in the same predicament? Get to spend 10 minutes once or twice a week with a shrink who will spend 8 of those minutes talking to themselves and then write a script for the least-efficacious (but non-habit-forming!) medications available? That's not help.
In places with decent public funding for this stuff, the only way out this unhelpful environment is to gain enough false humility to be able to pretend to have something in common with those in the required daily group therapy sessions and work towards becoming an expert at telling agreeable lies.
In places that don't have public funding for this stuff, it's perhaps even worse: The money will run out before the fake humility kicks in.
Either way: They send you packing and nothing is fixed. Things are only worse. You're even more broke than you were before (and likely jobless by now as well), and rent isn't getting paid so the despair of seemingly-inevitable homelessness just moved a few steps closer. Whatever other problems you had are now also intensified.
It's not help. It's kicking the can down the road.
(Ah yes, downvotes. That's kit and parcel with the subject matter. See what happens when a person tries to reach out and talk about this stuff? They're actively shunned. It's absolutely fucking amazing.)
It's sad. The reality you describe is hard to grasp for many but it's the reality of modern life in many ways. I can't say that I wouldn't resort to saying things that I don't fully believe in if one of my friends was on the verge. I would give it shot to make them reconsider it and perhaps it was just an irrational moment.
My sister killed herself about 20 years ago. It wasn't a spur of the moment thing. She was an extremely intelligent and physically-capable person. What she did was both very elaborate and very planned, and it is clear that she had rationalized this escape for a long time before she began the lengthy process of executing it.
Nobody but her saw it coming, and I still do not know what kind of resources could ever have succeeded at allowing her to make a different decision.
But I am sure that whatever it was that her demons and issues consisted of, that none of them could be excised by simple platitudes, abject kindness, or minimizing the problems by pretending to be able to relate. She was smarter than that.
Lived in Brownsville for a bit and got to know him towards the end of my stint there. Very nice guy his family does a lot for the arts in the city. He will be incredibly missed.
I am of course familiar with him from Breaking Bad. I accidentally stumbled across him participating in the (awful) series by Bear Grylls The Island. He did a celebrity survival challenge. Totally wasn't expecting to see him on a 2AM YouTube binge after years of not seeing him at all.
It was one of the things I appreciated about BB - how many tv shows would cast someone with Cerebral Palsy in it? It made the show feel more genuine and realistic, along with being set in a place in America that isn't a well-known location.
I'm sad and angered to learn that his manager committed fraud with his tax payments - I hope the authorities pursue her and hold her accountable for that.
41 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 50.4 ms ] threadI had listened to some podcasts where he said his financial situation hadn't been great.
If you watch them, you can kind of see his mind thinking.
I think you only notice such things if you've entertained the thoughts yourself.
in case anyone was wondering (like me)
A reminder to everyone here: Even when you can’t see a way forward, one can still emerge. Stay. Reach out. You don’t have to face the darkest moments alone.
I’m hard pressed to blame this solely on his financial situations. Cerebral palsy changes the brain. It might be that he had another underlying mental illness that he was afraid to talk about because of the stigma. I mean, this is just guessing, but a lot of people live through our situations without dying by suicide.
I’m a three times suicide survivor and I can tell you it wasn’t anything financial just something that took over my body
The thing that stopped me from attempting again was 15 years ago I finally realized that no one knows what happens after you die. So I couldn’t really say for sure whether they’re dying by suicide would lead me in a better situation.
I can't imagine what you're going through but just know that you matter and that the world is a better place with you in it. I hope you are doing better and you get the help you need.
But gradually, things got better in my life. I have had so much joy in the 20 years since. I still have bad days sometimes, but on the whole, I feel such a sense of gratitude.
I can't promise anyone that their own situation will get better. I can only say that my experience is that it is possible.
I accepted life as an adventure. A true adventure, when you say "eff it", I am gonna die anyway so why not embrace the suffering as part of it.
For me though, it was my psychosis driving my SI. Not much rational thought going on.
And I try think about this the same way about my birth. I really cannot say what it was like before... So death is kind of the same. But the 'inbetween' matters. At least it mattered in my case. For now, it helps to live just by the day and not think beyond it.
If anyone is reading this and is in a dark place please know that things can be better with the right support and help.
I guess Noaidi, me, and other folks here are proof that it all works.
It works, for sure, and I need to be more vocal about my survival and how I did, and still do it. Thank you again, and I am glad you came out of all of that with such great insight. _/\_
Call 988, get sent to spend some time off of work while locked up with others in the same predicament? Get to spend 10 minutes once or twice a week with a shrink who will spend 8 of those minutes talking to themselves and then write a script for the least-efficacious (but non-habit-forming!) medications available? That's not help.
In places with decent public funding for this stuff, the only way out this unhelpful environment is to gain enough false humility to be able to pretend to have something in common with those in the required daily group therapy sessions and work towards becoming an expert at telling agreeable lies.
In places that don't have public funding for this stuff, it's perhaps even worse: The money will run out before the fake humility kicks in.
Either way: They send you packing and nothing is fixed. Things are only worse. You're even more broke than you were before (and likely jobless by now as well), and rent isn't getting paid so the despair of seemingly-inevitable homelessness just moved a few steps closer. Whatever other problems you had are now also intensified.
It's not help. It's kicking the can down the road.
(Ah yes, downvotes. That's kit and parcel with the subject matter. See what happens when a person tries to reach out and talk about this stuff? They're actively shunned. It's absolutely fucking amazing.)
Nobody but her saw it coming, and I still do not know what kind of resources could ever have succeeded at allowing her to make a different decision.
But I am sure that whatever it was that her demons and issues consisted of, that none of them could be excised by simple platitudes, abject kindness, or minimizing the problems by pretending to be able to relate. She was smarter than that.
* born with cerebral palsy
* adopted, parents separated while 2 mths old, raised only by his mother
* his mother disabled since he was 13, had to assume financial responsibility for her and his then 2yr old sister
That must have been a very difficult life, hats off to him.
It was one of the things I appreciated about BB - how many tv shows would cast someone with Cerebral Palsy in it? It made the show feel more genuine and realistic, along with being set in a place in America that isn't a well-known location.
I'm sad and angered to learn that his manager committed fraud with his tax payments - I hope the authorities pursue her and hold her accountable for that.