Wow, such a sad occurrence and heavy but worthwhile discussion about what life really boils down to. Sadly, not living in the USA I had never seen his show. However reading about him the past couple of days I have understood what an important culture figure he was and how his respect for native cultures and their cooking helped to counteract the "White Explorer Chefs discovering and reinventing Exotic Foods" POV of the culinary industry. His point that most of the French, Italian, Gourmet and etc cuisines in the the world are in fact cooked by Hispanics from Mexico and South America was long overdue in this racist white world. White people didn't invent much of anything culturally speaking, they invaded other countries and stole it from the real inhabitants just like they robbed the lands those people lived on. From what I read, he always made a point of talking to the people who were in fact the creators of the food and not some pompous chef or food critic. The other thing I might mention, and I don't know if he did, is the amount of outright sexism and machismo in the food industry where all the restaurants have "Chefs" who are male, and women are generally only cooks in lowly restaurants or at home where they feed most people in the world. Women are okay to slave at home to feed the family but only men, it seems, are capable of cooking food good enough for high-quality restaurants. What sexist hogwash.
As to the reason for his suicide I have no information but I find it terribly sad that a man who was so active and dynamically involved in the world would kill himself so young. Yes young, because to me at 74, sixty-one is young. However, if depression was the cause then I can fully understand it because having suffered two serious depressions in my life during which I contemplated killing myself, I know that that is something that happens quite easily as one descends into the darkness and insanity that takes over your mind. That I did not succumb to that impulse....during the second depression six years ago I in fact spent much thought on figuring out how to do it without harming anyone else in the process, without leaving myself only injured and a burden on my family, and at base without actually killing myself but killing the madness that had taken over my mind and emotions and left me a zombie devoid of feelings of any kind. I really did not want to die, what I wanted was to end the horror of being like that hour after hour, day after day because it had made me a non-being and I could not bear not to be human in spite of it having led me to that deep dark hole.
I know that this may seem a paradox and a conundrum but that is what it was for me. My state of being somehow had become unbearable and I not only didn't know why, but I didn't know how to make it stop being that way. So I just went deeper into the labryinth of a kind of madness that prior to that I had only seen in films like Sybil or the Snake pit and those were mere artistic imaginings of what it really was. I will not describe the things that I experienced, thought, heard, said, and did here because they are the stuff nobody can fathom anyway, unless they too have been there. So those who have will understand of what I speak. Suffice it to say that had it not been for the hard-willed insistence of my wife to drag me against my will to a shrink here and then to force me to take the meds he prescribed me I would have probably ended up in the hospital on life support. I went from 150 lbs down to 115 lbs during the course of 4 months from not eating hardly at all....no appetite and when my bowels stopped working and I only could crap once in 6 days, even less. I looked like a concentration camp inmate and none of my clothes fit me so I stayed at home hidden away so as not to be seen. I was totally inactive and simply sat on the couch doing nothing all day long I could not read or watch TV or listen to music and forget about playing the sax. Nothing gave me pleasure, nothing gave me displeasure because I was emotionless. When I tried to smile it was a grimace that scared the neighbor's daughter in the elevator one day. So I avoided all the neighbors and only went out when I knew nobody would see me. I was like a wraith and I scared myself when I looked in the mirror. But I could not find my way out of that place. I had insomnia for 5.5 months and barely slept at all. I'll spare the rest....it was awful and only my natural optimism kept me going underneath it all because I somehow knew that this creature was not me and I did not want to kill myself because it would destroy my wife and son forever. Hurting myself was not the problem, I just could not hurt others and that is what kept me from not jumping out the window though I made trial attempts at finding an efficient way to do it and be sure of dying in the act. Every day for a couple of weeks I did that but couldn't figure out how because the window have no sills or ledges and are too hard to get out of. My DIY mind was trying to work out the do it yourself way to commit suicide successfully but without harming anyone or anything. Jump in front of a bus on Ave. Diagonal......it would cause an accident that would hurt the passengers and perhaps kill someone. Then the transit company would sue my wife and she would be left penniless. Every method had it's negative points that kept it from being feasible. The fact is that my very condition of being married with an 11 year old son made suicide impossible for me and so I went around in a circular hell of mental anguish with no way out until I finally got on an anti-depressant.
As to cures, in my case I can categorically state that anti-depressants work because in both depressions that is what brought me back to the surface in full bloom. The problem was that the doctor who treated me in 1991 didn't tell me, or didn't figure out that I was clinically depressed all my life, although to a lesser degree. I realized since the one six years ago that the reason I got into drugs so heavily in the 60s was as a way to self-medicate to deal with the depression I suffered during those years. I just didn't know that that was what I was doing it for. Had this doctor not told me that I could stop taking the med after a year of being depression free, she treated it as a situational depression due to new job in a new country, I would never have suffered the second and worse bout. This is what a gerontologist here told me when I saw him early on--he said why did I go off the med and when I said it was because the shrink said I could, he said "You can never go off the medication, ever". Even though that has been my bi-polar sister's problem for years....going off the meds when feeling better.....I didn't believe him and didn't take the med he prescribed me. It turned out to be the very one I was forced to take 4 months later when I was way down under the ocean in the middle of the Mariana trench of mental horror and I could have saved myself that awful journey had I only listened. There is so much more I could relate about how one thinks and acts when in the throes of depression that might help others but I will say only one more thing which I think of utmost importance.
Do not read the prospectus of the medication you are prescribed!!! Ever. Are you a doctor? Are you competent to diagnose medical conditions in others, let alone yourself? That is the worst thing one can do and everyone does it. The meds come with an encyclopedic list of everything that can or has possibly gone wrong with someone, or lab rats, taking the med and by law they have to list it all. They do it to protect themselves, but it doesn't mean you will suffer any of the mentioned side effects. Trust your doctor because if you have told him about all your meds and compete medical history he will know if you should or should not take a particular med. Are you a lab rat? Are you a doctor? Don't read the prospectus because in your depressed state you will decide, like I did, that the medication will do something bad and will refuse to take it just because it says that 2% of the test subject suffered that effect in trials of X number of people. You see I had horrible insomnia and couldn't sleep even with sleeping meds because I got habituated to them and they rebounded on me. That means that they ceased to work at all but left me addicted to them anyway. When I bought the med the Gerontologist prescribed for me I read the prospectus.....here they come in the box of pills, but in the states they are online.....it said quite clearly that the med can cause insomnia. So my dubious mind, looking for an out from taking what I was sure would not work, said, Ah Ha, it causes insomnia and that is what I already suffer from. I can't possibly take this stuff because it will destroy me. LOLOLOL.....Doctor JIA knew his medicine and so threw the pills in the trash only to end up taking the very same medication 3.5 months later when I was near the end of everyone's rope.
So believe me when I say that if you are not bipolar, modern serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRI) do work and do not make you into a zombie in the least, like the meds of 45 years ago. Twenty-six years ago I was given Seldane, which was already a major advance in anti-depression meds that worked fantastically and had no side-effects, and these newer meds are far better than that. With it I made a full recovery within a couple of weeks and have not had even one depressing thought in the six years since then because I take my pill everyday. Depression is wholly caused by a chemical imbalance of one kind or other in the brain. This is fact. And today they have a variety of medications that reverse those imbalances and end the depression just like an antibiotic does away with the bacteria that causes an illness in the body.
What is more, up until then I had suffered for years from thinking about dying and death and was deathly afraid of non-existence, whatever the hell that might be. Years and years of waking up in the middle of the night or being unable to sleep or thinking about it at an idle moment during the day and always having the fear of the nothingness that must surely come with death. From the moment the med too full effect up until now, I have not had one moment when I had any fearful thoughts of death like that at all. Zero, zilch, nada. Sure I can think about dying and death if I want, but it is totally different. Death is part of life....one cannot be alive without dying....so if you love life you cannot possibly not die, hence it is natural and will come when it must. And what is more....and this is how I think of it and have since then....death will take care of itself so I need not contemplate it nor think about it nor dwell on it because it serves no purpose. My job in life is to live and live fully and completely up until such time as I am no longer alive because death has come and done it's job over which my thoughts or actions will avail not. Therefore thinking about death in any other manner is a total waste of time and a meaningless and counterproductive activity to be dropped if it should happen. So anytime a thought about my own death comes into my mind I simply think, yeah that will happen but so what? It's not my concern because it will take care of itself and I'm going to take care of living and that alone. Thinking about this now I realise that it is a Buddhistic approach to living, as well as a meditative practice out of Vipasana meditation where if you see your mind picking up thoughts that are really just like garbage lying on your path, you drop them and continue on on your journey unattached to such detritus.
To any of you suffering depression I hope this is of help because it is all real and true and I only relate it here so that others may not suffer the same awful mental states I experienced.
I read his first book- Kitchen Confidential when it first came out, and really enjoyed it. I spent some time in P-Town in the 70's as a tourist, and also 
