Last year I was at work and my boss announced that Robin Williams had committed suicide. I knew a bit about Robin Williams’ because I had heard him talk about AA a lot and use a lot of the AA jargon I knew a lot about after attending meetings for two years and going through the rehab racket myself. I was at the time on antipsychotic/antischizophrenic drugs, like Robin Williams. These drugs are routinely prescribed to people in rehabs and psychiatric wards off-label as ‘mood stabilizers’, and they were prescribed to me to ‘help me stop obsessing’ about the systemic problems of AA that I was not allowed to discuss with any LCSW I knew in NYS. These drugs also are known to cause ‘drug-induced Parkinsonism’ which is symptomatically indistinguishable from Parkinson’s disease. They cause flickered vision, involuntary shaking, in my experience. I told my boss that I knew why he killed himself. “Too much AA”. Why did I think this? Because I was seriously considering suicide myself.

It was no surprise to me that Robin Williams had recently been to rehab at Hazelden (a twelve step rehab), went to an AA meeting after getting out, and then killed himself. It wasn’t surprising to me because 12-step rehab made me want to kill myself. It’s not funny. He wasn’t dishonest, defective, insane, powerless, or selfish. But that’s what they told him he was.