The punk-rock singer and raconteur Henry Rollins has lambasted Robin Williams for taking his own life. In an editorial for LA Weekly entitled Fuck Suicide, Rollins wrote:
I simply cannot understand how any parent could kill themselves. How in the hell could you possibly do that to your children? I don’t care how well adjusted your kid might be — choosing to kill yourself, rather than to be there for that child, is every shade of awful, traumatic and confusing. I think as soon as you have children, you waive your right to take your own life. No matter what mistakes you make in life, it should be your utmost goal not to traumatize your kids. So, you don’t kill yourself.
Rollins’s piece also acknowledges Williams’s acting talent, and “that his personal struggles were quite real,” describing depression as being “more isolating than anything else you have ever experienced”. He also praised his performances for US troops: “On more than one of my USO tours, Robin Williams had been on the same stage a few days before me. That’s all I needed to know about him. As far as I was concerned, he was a good man.”
However, he continues to elaborate on suicide, and goes on to say that “when someone negates their existence, they cancel themselves out in my mind... I no longer take this person seriously.
“Almost 40,000 people a year kill themselves in America... In my opinion, that is 40,000 people who blew it. Fuck suicide. Life isn’t anything but what you make it. For all the people who walked from the grocery store back to their house, only to be met by a robber who shot them in the head for nothing — you gotta hang in there.”
There have been a smattering of other critics of Williams, including TalkSport’s Alan Brazil and Fox News’s Shep Smith – TalkSport apologised while Brazil was unrepentant, though Smith expressed regret for his words. Other controversial voices were Barry Norman, who wondered if Williams’s battles with mental health led him to take on sentimental film projects, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose tweet reading “Genie, you’re free” was seen as glorifying suicide.
