At the time, it was widely speculated that Robin’s long-documented battle with depression had been the cause of his death, but now Susan has revealed he suffering from the neurodegenerative disease Lewy Body Dementia (LBD), and it was that, not mental illness, that drove him to suicide.
“It was not depression that killed Robin,” she told People. “Depression was one of let’s call it 50 symptoms and it was a small one.”
Lewy Body Dementia is often misdiagnosed, because it presents itself as a cluster of seemingly unrelated symptoms: visual hallucinations, delusions, changes in reasoning and thinking, Parkinson’s symptoms, and massive swings in alertness from one hour to the next.
“They present themselves like a pinball machine,” Susan said. “You don’t know exactly what you’re looking at.”
Susan’s retelling of the last months of Robin’s life is nothing short of gut-wrenching, as Robin was both losing his mind, and painfully aware that he was. He suffered from dementia, paranoia, hallucination, and depression, and although he tried to keep himself mentally together, in the final month, he struggled, wavering from being lucid one minute, to saying something completely out of context the next.
“The last month he could not. It was like the dam broke,” she said in an interview with Good Morning America.
Lewy Body Dementia is so tricky to diagnose that the confirmation only came when the autopsy was performed. In life, Robin had been misdiagnosed with Parkinson‘s disease. Doctors had been planning on checking him in to a facility for neurocognitive testing, and had given him less than three years to live.
“They would have been hard years,” Susan said. “And it’s a good chance he would have been locked up.”
The last time they spoke, it was as they were going to bed on the night of August 9; Susan went to work the next day without speaking to him.
“He said, ‘Goodnight, my love’. And I said, ‘Goodnight, my love’. And then he said, ‘Goodnight’. That was the last.”
She says to People: “I know now the doctors, the whole team was doing exactly the right thing,” she told People. “It’s just that this disease was faster than us and bigger than us. We would have gotten there eventually.”
If you are feeling suicidal, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. If you want to find out more about Diffuse Lewy Body Dementia, go HERE.
via People / Good Morning America.
Image: Kevin Winter via Getty.
