Suffering from dementia with Lewy bodies (LCD), Robin Williams suffered from mood swings, hallucinations and paranoia.
- Dementia with Lewy bodies (LCD) from which Robin Williams suffered is the second most common neurodegenerative dementia after Alzheimer’s disease.
- This disease is a form of cognitive impairment characterized by abnormal deposits of a protein called alpha-synuclein that form inside brain cells.
“Robin wasn’t crazy. It was one of his biggest fears,” said Susan Schneider Williams, Robin Williams’ widow, at a lengthy lecture on Lewy body dementia.
This disease, from which her husband suffered, is a neurodegenerative disease so little known that the diagnosis was only made two months after the suicide of the actor, in August 2014.
More than 40 symptoms
On the occasion of Life Itself – an event where many health specialists give lectures, Susan Schneider Williams explained that dementia with Lewy bodies manifests itself by more than 40 possible symptoms, similar to those of Alzheimer’s and of Parkinson’s, as reported CNN.
In fact, three months before his death, the actor had received a false diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.
Signs of this condition include disturbances in thinking, fluctuations in attention, movement problems, visual hallucinations, sleep disturbances, behavioral and mood problems, and changes in bodily functions such as as the ability to control urination.
Susan Schneider Williams believes that in her husband, “the beginning of the cascade of symptoms” arrived as early as 2012 with excessive fear and anxiety, before turning into paranoia: “The amygdala area had a huge number of bodies of Lewy. This area of the brain defines our ability to regulate our emotions, particularly fear and anxiety. Robin’s was basically broken.”
“Chemical warfare in his brain”
Doctors whom Schneider Williams met with after learning of the diagnosis “reported that it was one of the worst pathologies they had seen. He had approximately 40% loss of dopaminergic neurons,” she wrote in his 2016 article titled “The Terrorist Inside My Husband’s Brain” for the journal Neurology
“The massive proliferation of Lewy bodies throughout his brain had done so much damage to neurons and neurotransmitters that in fact, you could say he had chemical warfare in his brain.”
Chronic delusions
She also talks about chronic delusions: “The people around you are unable (…) to bring you back to reality. So it’s incredibly terrifying, for all the people around a delusional person and for that person themselves. .”
Susan Schneider Williams also talks about her husband’s oversights, his mood swings, sleepless nights tinged with delirium: “At night, our house was like ‘Night at the Museum,'” she says. It took hours, sometimes days, to get him out of his nocturnal delirium”.
The actor also suffered from hallucinations, a symptom specific to dementia with Lewy bodies, which can therefore help to differentiate it from Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
In addition, she argues that “structural and chemical changes” in Robin Williams’ brain were “responsible for the psychiatric symptoms” he suffered from, and therefore his depression.
