So I did a search for the quotation - the alleged quotation, I mean. The first couple of pages of results came up dry which is to say that there plenty of hits, ascribing the quotation to Williams, but none of them told where or when he'd said it. That's usually a sign of a bogus quotation. And then I found a Wikiquote Talk page of unsourced quotes ascribed to Robin Williams, including the specimen my friend had posted. As I've found before, several of them were lines he'd spoken in this or that movie, and many people figure that everything an actor says in a movie is his or her own creation. Not this one, though. In either case, it's probably bogus.
But that, as dispiriting as it is, wasn't why I felt so bad when I saw this meme. If it expressed a genuine truth, even Robin Willams's truth, I could give it some credit. But as I thought it over, I realized that I don't think it's true, and if I can't have a valid attribution I at least need some evidence to support it. From my own milder experience of depression, and from what I know of others' more severe experience, depression just sucks all the life out of a person. It doesn't drive you to make others happy; it makes any kind of action almost impossible. In my observation, the saddest people often try to drag everyone else down with them. Overall, this meme stinks of the Culture of Therapy's false psychology / spirituality, and I say the hell with it.
For all of that, I'm seeing out 2019 in a pretty good mood, although this meme and writing about it were a light kick in the slats. But on the whole I'm good, and I hope you are too, dear reader.
