The Fisher King is an amazing movie that I’ve seen dozens of times. It’s also one in which Robin Williams portrayed a completely unrealistic person with schizophrenia. I don’t mean to criticize him here: The problems are in the writing and the directing more so than the portrayal.
Then why do I bring it up? Because Parry, the character he played, tells us something about what people are struggling with in the aftermath of Robin Williams’s death. Parry’s illness is caused by a brutal, but simple narrative event; his symptoms are exacerbated by simple event and solved by a simple event. At the end he seems to be cured by an act of self-sacrifice symbolized in another character handing him a cup.
We’ve been told by the media to think about mental disorders as plot devices, obvious narrative arcs, things with simple causes and simple solutions. They aren’t. Someone can seem to have everything, yet be miserable. Someone can have access to the best treatment, but still fall to suicide.
Sometimes the media tells us mental disorders are hopeless, but that’s not true either. We have treatments that work pretty well for many things. At the same time, for some people those treatments are not enough, or work much more slowly than one would hope.
Some of the people around you are having trouble, and some of them make it through each day with a force of will you would never suspect. We are not fiction, and our problems are often complicated and rarely solved by plot twists. If you can support someone who is struggling one day at a time, please do.