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Prince: death by ignorance and fear

There it was on my Facebook feed yesterday: Trending: Prince. Why was Prince a trending topic when he’d been found dead a month ago? Then I learned his official cause of death had just been released: “Accidental Fentanyl toxicity.” In other words, he unintentionally overdosed on a drug he was taking to treat chronic pain. After reading the comments on the various new Prince articles, it hit me: though Prince’s body died of opioid overdose, the autopsy report may as well have said “death by ignorance and fear,” both his own, and the public’s.

If “death by ignorance and fear” sounds inflammatory and sensational, stop and think about it. Why on earth would anyone wait to get medical help for something that could kill them? Would you furtively seek treatment if you realized you had something potentially fatal? Would you wait until things were so bad that your life was literally falling apart and you were afraid you might die? No. You’d rightly engage in proactive self-care and get professional medical treatment, with no fear that anyone would proclaim you as weak-willed and morally bankrupt. You would do it with no fear that it might permanently damage your reputation, your career, or negatively affect your family. But that’s not the case with addiction and mental health.

The whole thing is set up for failure and death. The docs prescribing pain pills instead of treatments to ease the cause of the pain. The easy reliance on the pills to "get you through" what you have to and want to do in your day to day life. Then when you are hooked, you can't get off because vultures like the people at TMZ are waiting for a sniff of something wrong with you, waiting to splash your face all over the world as a drug addict. Then you can't stop performing, you'll disappoint your fans, you have all these people who are dependent on you for their livlihood.

You just want the pain to go away. You don't want to die. You just want to function for the people you love and those who love you back.

I live with chronic pain. I understand his struggle. I just wish he'd found his way out of that maze.

It breaks my heart.

[Edited 6/6/16 13:25pm]