Most people don’t know that I had quite a bit in common with Heath Ledger. Besides being ruggedly handsome and a tremendous actor, we apparently both had some problems with sleep and/or anxiety.Today it was officially released that Heath Ledger’s death was caused by an accidental overdose of six types of prescription pills. Six?! I can just hear it now. Hey, everyone — time to rush to judgment on something you don’t know about. Talk about everyone in Hollywood being drug addicts or sinful or whatever lie you tell to make your life seem more righteous, but millions of good people in this country and around the world suffer from sleep and anxiety-related disorders every year. For most people it’s a temporary thing or a result of too much caffeine, but for some people it’s much more serious. As a person who had these types of problems throughout my life, I can fully understand the pain and turmoil he must have been going through.
In my case, I noticed my sleep problems during my childhood. I’m sure those around me dismissed it as just being a night owl, but even then I knew the thoughts in my head needed to slow down sometime. Unfortunately, this rarely occurred when I wanted it to each night, so I would lie awake for hours in bed just waiting for sleep. When I was in high school, I could always be a little tired and do well with classes and stuff. College was a different matter, though. My problems got out of control quickly as I found myself in charge of my own schedule and needed to cope with longer (and later) study sessions just to get by. During my second quarter, I was unable to sleep, unable to wake when I did get to sleep, got ulcers and psychosomatic pain, became irritable, and started to develop major depression. Yipes! And I got the ball rolling by having serious sleeping problems caused by not being able to tell my brain to take a chill.
Eventually I sought treatment with the school psychiatrist. I mentioned that I was having a difficult time sleeping. He gave me a prescription for the popular sleeping pill, Ambien. I took the recommended dosage for a month. It didn’t do anything to make me tired. The next month, I went back to the psychiatrist. He told me to take twice as much Ambien each night. Still nothing. The next month, he gave me an anti-anxiety drug to take with the double dose of Ambien. Bingo, but now I was asleep for twelve hours at a time and in such a deep sleep that I couldn’t hear my alarm clock. I was a zombie for the remaining twelve hours of the day.
I don’t recall how long I was on sleeping pills. My friends warned me that there was a good chance of getting hooked. I’m glad that never happened. Eventually, though, I had to say enough was enough and find my own solution to the problem. My way out was with a little more exercise and a lot of meditation. Things get so bad for some people though that they turn to self-medication using both legal and illegal substances. In most cases that I’ve seen, this only makes things worse. I’m not going to claim to know if that’s what Heath Ledger was trying to do. I’ve been prescribed every drug that he took at one time or another. And as I found out, maybe one pill just wasn’t doing the job for him.
I guess my point is that unless you’ve had a freight train of thought speeding through your head every night for more than twenty-five or thirty years, you don’t know — you can’t know. Too many apparently normal people suffer with sleep and anxiety-related afflictions throughout their lives, but either don’t seek treatment or don’t get an effective treatment. One report that I watched on Ledger’s death said (after the obligatory “be careful with prescription medication” speech) that the cocktail he took would have caused him to go painlessly. I sure hope he did and finally got the peace he deserved.
R.I.P. Heath — you’ve brought joy to a hell of a lot of people. That’s one of the greatest successes any man could ever wish for, but few ever achieve.
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