Hunter S. Thompson

Posted on February 22, 2005 in Addictions Bipolar Disorder Celebrity Suicide

He doesn’t appear on any of the lists. At least not on the lists that I have been looking for. Lists of famous people who had It. Hunter S. Thompson showed many signs — drug abuse, wildly euphoric states, depression, and now suicide — but no one ever pointed a finger to him and said “He’s one. He suffers from bipolar disorder.

I’m one. I suffer from bipolar disorder. Where depression and even alcoholism or narcotics abuse are all right, to be bipolar is to be firmly classed as loony. People get depressed for a reason. Alcoholics and narcotics addicts just need to cut the sauce. But to be bipolar? Well, that’s so out there that it is shameful.

People with bipolar disorder just swing wildly from up to down and down to up for no reason, sometimes several times per day. How can you trust someone like that with — anything? Even schizophrenics get more sympathy because they, at least, hallucinate, but sufferers of manic-depression are alternately blamed and shunned for their condition.

We get told things like:

• You shouldn’t use medication to control your condition because that’s just another form of addiction (particularly popular in 12-step groups)
• You’re just pretending to be sick so you don’t have to be accountable for your actions
• You should be locked up because you are a danger to other people

I look at what Thompson faced and I can say that the reason he chose to deny his disease was straightforward and simple: he got more respect being an alcoholic and a junkie. Many people use drugs to keep the manias going: when they crash, the depressions are catastrophic. I have seen no greater struggle than an alcoholic or a narcotics addict coming to terms with her or his illness. AA and NA speak of denial of one’s addiction, but they often perpetuate the denial of the disease behind the addiction.

Thompson thought himself better off being undiagnosed. This is why the quaint idea of taking a gun and poking it into his mouth, tilted up ever so slightly, appealed to him. For all we know, he was just fooling around in what is called a “mixed state” when the energy of a mania combines with the despair of a depression. Many people in this state who have survived report that they didn’t really intend to commit suicide. They were “testing the limits”. Many a man has died tinkering with a gun. When Ernest Hemingway’s family reported that he had died “in an accident”, I believe that they could be right.

It could have worked like this — for Hemingway and for Thompson: You get out the gun. Load it with bullets. Examine it in detail, check out all the mechanisms: the barrel, the hammer, the trigger. Moves the trigger a bit, testing it. Then the barrel goes in the mouth. Just how far can he push at the metal tongue before it…. He finds out. And he is dead.

It’s that fatal curiosity, that sense of immortality that leads many a suicide to take a gun or a knife or a bottle of pills or a rubber hose. People who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge and survive report suddenly changing their mind in mid-flight, looking for that current, that eddy, that piece of driftwood that will make the difference. Undoubtably, some never make it. The gun goes off. The bleeding is too much. No one finds them in time to get their stomach pumped. They don’t mean to die, but they do.

The habit of our time is to dismiss suicide as insanity. Those who attempt it and then seek help may be the most sensitive and aware of the madness around us. They try to send a sign that the world is too loud, too polluted, too filled with bright lights, strange smells, and weird practices for any sane man or woman to not cry out. The only problem with their plan is that they die and don’t really change anything when they do. I think Hunter S. Thompson — who brought us close to the mania and depression inherent in our politics and leisure time activities — meant for that trigger not to sink so far. I know because that savage world of confident people who won’t get help surrounds me as it surrounded him. Without an understanding of what moved him, without the right to give it nonfatal meaning, he goofed. In a fit of perverse religiosity, he thought the voice of the gun was his own and that we would make sense of it as we made sense of his books.

Do I need to say that he was wrong?

Recommended reading: Bipolar Disorder Demystified: Mastering the Tightrope of Manic Depression by Lana Castle.