Listen to the entire program with Sonali Kolhatkar<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"\/home\/graphics\/robin_williams.jpg\")
On Monday Academy Award winning actor and comedian Robin Williams was found asphyxiated with a belt around his neck in his home in Tiburon, California. Police confirmed that his death was a suicide. Despite an illustrious career in Hollywood which started with the TV show Mork and Mindy and included movies like The Birdcage, Mrs. Doubtfire and Dead Poet’s Society, Williams suffered throughout his life from drug addiction, depression and possibly a bipolar disorder. He had checked into a rehab center just a month before his death. Williams was only 63 years old.<\/p>\n
It may be hard to fathom why someone who had achieved such stardom would decide to end his own life, but suicide has actually become the 10th leading cause of death in the United States surpassing even the numbers of people who are killed every year in car accidents. Between 1999 and 2010 suicide rates have risen by close to 30 percent for Americans between the ages of 35 to 64 and have been the highest among middle aged men. While suicide rates usually rise during economic downturns, over 90 percent of people who do die by suicide have a known mental illness. <\/p>\n
Recently researchers from Johns Hopkins University found a genetic mutation called SKA2 which may provide a marker for whether someone may turn to suicide. Scientists were able to use the marker to predict whether someone had contemplated suicide with an 80 percent rate of accuracy.<\/p>\n
GUEST: Gabor Mate, a Canadian physician and best selling author, whose books include In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, and When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection. Dr. Mat\u00e9 ran a popular family practice in East Vancouver for two decades. For seven years he also served as Medical Coordinator of the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver Hospital, caring for the terminally ill. More recently he worked for twelve years in Vancouver\u2019s notorious Downtown Eastside neighborhood with patients suffering from drug addiction, mental illness and HIV<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Monday Academy Award winning actor and comedian Robin Williams was found asphyxiated with a belt around his neck in his home in Tiburon, California. Police confirmed that his death was a suicide. Despite an illustrious career in Hollywood which started with the TV show Mork and Mindy and included movies like The Birdcage, Mrs. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-program"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41031"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41037,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41031\/revisions\/41037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}