Robin Williams wrote, “I want to help people be less afraid,” inside the cover of a Twelve Steps book in summer 2012, according to a 2021 Sky News report. That was approximately two years before his death in August 2014. The report describes the sentence as a hoped-for legacy—not a suicide note or a farewell.
What did Robin Williams’s note say?
Sky News reported that the note read, “I want to help people be less afraid.” It was written inside the cover of a Twelve Steps book. The wording and details here are attributed to that report; the original note was not independently inspected for this account. Sky News, January 16, 2021.
When did he write it?
The report places the note in summer 2012. Williams died in August 2014, making the interval roughly two years; the report does not give a precise date for when he wrote it. It also does not identify the book’s exact title or edition, so neither can be established from this account.
What the note does—and does not—tell us
Sky News presents the sentence as an expression of the legacy Williams hoped to leave. It is not identified as a suicide note, a farewell, or a prediction. A brief line in a book cannot establish his private state of mind, explain his death, or show why he wrote it.
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How later medical reporting fits the timeline
Medical reporting about Williams’s final months is separate from the story of the 2012 note. TIME’s account of an essay by his widow, Susan Schneider Williams, says he received a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis about a month before his death; Lewy body disease was identified later. TIME, October 1, 2016. ABC News reports that the coroner’s report identified Lewy body dementia. ABC News, November 2, 2015.
Those accounts provide context about his illness, not evidence about what the note meant or why he wrote it. They do not support attributing the sentence to dementia or reducing his death to a single explanation.
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Further reading
For a broader biography, Dave Itzkoff’s Robin is identified as a biography in a Vanity Fair excerpt about Williams’s final days. That excerpt does not establish that the book contains or reproduces this particular note. Vanity Fair, May 8, 2018.
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