Susan Schneider Williams, widow of comedian-actor Robin Williams, spoke candidly Tuesday about the neurological diseases that contributed to her husband’s debilitation and suicide a year ago.
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Susan Schneider Williams explained that her husband had been suffering from Lewy body dementia, a debilitating brain disease.
After a lifetime of struggles with addiction, Williams had been “completely clean and sober” in the eight years before his death, but his chronic depression had returned along with paranoia, she added.
“I know now the doctors, the whole team was doing exactly the right things”, Susan said.
“No. Not even – no. No…I mean, he was sick and exhausted of what was going on, absolutely…and when he got the Parkinson’s diagnosis…in one sense, it was like this is it. This is what we’ve been – we’ve been chasing something, now we found it. And we felt the sense of release and relief”. It wasn’t the depression that fans worldwide believed had caused him to take his own life, but a rare form of dementia. “People…would say to me, ‘God, I wish I had done something more for him. I know we did everything we could”, Williams told ABC News. The disease, also known as Dementia with Lewy bodies, is often misdiagnosed and causes those suffering from it to vary in mental status.
His physical symptoms included stiffness, slumping, a shuffling gait and “losing his ability in his voice”, she said.
She then revealed he was scheduled to go to a facility for neurocognitive testing a week before his suicide.
While much has been written about Robin’s long battle with depression, Susan seems committed to changing the public narrative around her husband’s death.
When he couldn’t be revived, she was allowed to see him and apparently told him that she forgave him “50 billion percent” and that he was the bravest man she knew.
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The disease started taking its toll on Robin Williams in the past year before his death, with heightened levels of anxiety, delusions and impaired movement. “You know, we were living a nightmare”.
