Thank you for the information on Mr. Wilson. However, I’m gonna stick to what I said earlier — that the problems may have started long before the romantic breakup. Thing is that large numbers of people with depression and other forms of mental illness don’t want to admit that they have a problem. Or they are afraid that if they do, it will ruin their careers or embarrass their families. I know I had problems long before I sought help. I am by no means famous, but it was customary in my family to buck up and deal with things alone. As I was told once, in a conversation about counseling, it wasn’t right to “air the dirty laundry” to strangers. I didn’t seek help for my problems till I fell into a horrible depression after my father died. But to this day, most of my family doesn’t know I received counseling and was on medication for a time. If they knew or would know now, I would never hear the end of it.
And many who fall into drug and/or alcohol addiction often do so to cover up their problem or to self medicate. Often this self-medication does indeed cover up the problem to the point where no diagnosis or an inaccurate diagnosis is made. I once worked for a guy — brilliant lawyer and an all-around nice guy — but when his wife became terminally ill, he just fell apart. I knew he was drinking and assumed he was depressed. He did seek counseling for his depression and took anti-depressants. But I didn’t find out till years later (and apparently neither did he) that he actually was manic-depressive. He was only receiving treatment for half his problem...the other half went untreated because no one recognized it. Today, he’s part of a medical school program to treat his illness — the hope is that the program will become a model for successful diagnosis and treatment of manic-depressive illness. Apparently, he is doing well under this program. It’s too bad that his problem was not sufficiently diagnosed years ago — he could have recovered much earlier.