Anyone remember "Mork & Mindy"?
It's gotten fashionable to blame all the suicides of notable personalities on addiction to intoxicants or on a biologically-based depression syndrome, rather than acknowledge that killing yourself is a choice. No denying that depression and substance abuse exist, both of them related to many possible consequences, including suicide. Yet the vast majority of persons who are diagnosed with depression or with a substance abuse disorder never go on to kill themselves.
The addiction/depression thesis ignores a very large group--people who are in distress simply because their bodies are aging. In our culture, everyone is expected to live to be 95, with all that time spent enjoying perfect health and vigor. It doesn't work out that way. Despite high modern life expectancies, the Social Security period life table shows that only 5% of male newborns will reach age 95, and being frail, fully a quarter of all men who are 95 today will die within the year. Many people begin to struggle with painful age-related changes in their bodies as early as their 30s or 40s.
The thing is, if you're depressed or addicted, you can do something about it. If your joints are freezing up from arthritis and the doctors and surgeons don't offer a treatment, you're screwed. Even minor things like hemorrhoids turn out as embarrassing and permanent reminders of changeover after youth ends.
If Mr. Williams had any such problems, rules for polite discourse would not allow him to reveal them, or at least any discouragement over them. Political Correctness allows disclosure of a physical problem only in a context of overcoming it. Or of "managing" it, perhaps. Oddly, the same PC wants every public figure to hang their addiction and mental health laundry out to air.
Utter silence is also commentary on the inconvenient fact that as you get older, your mom and dad and friends and relatives die. Yet you can't grieve these passings for more than two weeks before "getting over it" and "getting on with life." Of course life goes on--but the pain remains.
Still idol for youth, Mr. Williams was no longer a young man, and like for everyone else who survives to see old age coming on, he was likely finding out that it's not for sissies. May the gods bless his name.