Robin Williams is dead – and it is also World Youth Day!

What has these two different by lines have in common? Not that it is World Youth Day and Robin Williams a favorite actor’s death was announced.

I am quite devastated to know, and I would have thought was the last person to suffer from depression, as he appeared to us the audience of his movies, to be a comic, and a person out to make other people happy, laugh etc., but in reality he was suffering and fighting his inner demons all the time!!!!!!!

I have been to Tiburon where his home is and it is an idyllic part of the world in the San Francisco Bay area, and even to have lived in that area would have been a fantasy for most of us.

Let it be a reminder to ALL OF US that what we see is not what it is. My blog consistently reminds us of it. I am constantly berating my readers to open their eyes to the reality behind the veneer that is Sri Lanka, before the veneer disappears and reality can no longer be hidden. By which time Sri Lanka as we know it would also have disappeared when you finally open your eyes!

So with World Youth Day focusing on MENTAL HEALTH a topic few people want to deal with, it is time we DID SOMETHING.

Today’s papers in Sri Lanka is full of the facts on World Youth Day. Taking 2011, where information is available. SUICIDES – Under 20 years of age female 209 and male 190 and between 21 and 30 female 231 and male 534, that is around 1200 youth kill themselves every year.

Further today’s paper noted that a girl of 14 who had a row with her father for having an affair with a man 20 years older than her, who jumped from the 7^th floor and killed herself!

Robin Williams had access to the best Mental Health that money could buy, and despite it he was not able to control his depression, which ultimately lead him to leave this world of HIS OWN DESIRE. He had been initially addicted to Cocaine and later was an alcoholic going in and out of rehab.

Let this be a reminder to our society to help our young people, first NOT to get addicted to Smoking and Alcohol, something peer pressure encourages and we must discourage, and secondly to deal with the consequences of Mental illness that arises from it or which cause alcoholism and addiction.