We expect our doctors to be competent, ethical, and up to date. What we don’t understand is that these qualities sometimes conflict. For example, does a new surgical technique really work, or does the patient just think it does? The only way to tell is with a clinical trial—somebody is going to secretly get a fake surgery as a test control. Is that ethical?

That’s just one of the many controversies the doctors are hotly debating (out of public sight, for the most part).

10Doctors Can Be Deceived Or Make Mistakes

Medical journals help physicians stay up to date. Unfortunately, they sometimes contain papers written by drug company ghostwriters. For instance: In 2000, a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine praised Vioxx, a new pain reliever. The writers—some of whom later turned out to be connected with the company that made Vioxx—played down cardiac side effects. Does Vioxx sound familiar? It was taken off the market in 2004 for—you guessed it—causing cardiac problems.

Most medical treatment goes through clinical trials to make sure that it works and is safe. However, experts recently went back through some of those studies and found that over a third of them had mistakes. These ranged from relatively small stuff all the way up to recommending treatment for the wrong group of people. And that’s not all. A second look at the studies that led governments to stockpile flu-fighting agents Tamiflu and Relenza showed that these drugs probably aren’t as effective as researchers once believed. They might shorten your bout of flu by half a day, but there’s no evidence that they will prevent complications or keep you out of the hospital.

9Advance Directives Can Let Dementia Patients In For Risky Research

Doctors won’t treat you without your informed consent. So what if you’re unconscious? Hopefully, you’ve filled out an advance directive. You might even have a research advance directive on file, if you don’t mind taking a chance and possibly helping others in the future. It’s pretty basic—unless you come down with dementia.

Alzheimer’s has been studied for over 100 years, but we still don’t know much about it. Research is a priority, and some scientists do it with the help of an advance directive. The special research consent has to be signed before the patient gets dementia, and this doesn’t happen often. Some believe that requiring this consent blocks valuable research. Others aren’t at all comfortable with the idea, and they’ve got a point, too. Terrible things have happened during human experiments.

The Alzheimer’s Association takes the middle ground. They suggest enrolling everybody in research if there’s little risk, obtaining the surrogate’s consent for risky research with potential benefits, and requiring research consent for any risky research without likely benefits.

8Incidental Findings Can Ruin Your Life

Modern medicine has the most powerful tools in history. However, sometimes it’s possible to see too much. Say you go to the ER because you’re feeling depressed, and routine tests show a mass on your adrenal gland. It’s such a common finding, doctors call it “incidentaloma.” These tumors are usually benign, but the doctors won’t know for sure that it’s not cancer unless they do a lot of tests.

Cancer? Do all the tests!

So they do all the tests, and those come back benign, because that’s what incidentalomas usually are. However, now you have huge medical bills and are feeling emotionally overwhelmed, maybe even suicidal. You could just ask the doctor not to tell you about incidental findings. However, if it involves gene sequencing, the doctor might ignore your request. The American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics tells its members to look for unrelated risky genes whenever they do genetic tests and to tell the patient about whatever they find. Medical technology can cause some expensive, heartbreaking problems. Nobody really knows how to handle the problem of incidental findings.

7Unethical Co-Branding

Co-branding can do wonderful things. For example, some credit card companies donate $100 to a medical center if new customers spend $500 within six months of being approved. Businesses, including hospitals, link their names with other companies for greater public visibility. It usually works out well for everybody. However, problems can come up if the hospitals don’t do their homework on potential business partners.

Some genetic screening companies, for example, avoid regulation by describing their tests as “recreational.” Some direct-to-consumer companies that provide cardiac screening are under attack by consumer groups for pushing tests that these groups claim will do more harm than good.

It’s a mixed bag. Even experts who oppose direct marketing to patients have to admit that there’s no solid evidence so far that it’s harmful as an educational tool. Beyond that, there’s a lot of controversy. So don’t automatically assume the name of a respected medical institution on something guarantees it’s just what the doctor ordered—think it through and read the fine print.

6You Could Wake Up During Surgery

As depressing as modern medicine can be, at least there’s anesthesia. Back in the day, surgery on a wide-awake patient was ghastly for everybody. Well, guess what? Today, one or two patients out of 1,000 wake up while they’re being operated on. Not surprisingly, up to 70 percent of them develop PTSD.

It happens when the general anesthesia is too light. The drugs are so powerful, that it’s a fine line between no pain and no vital signs. Anesthesiologists want to keep you alive and comfortable. Sometimes, they just can’t tell how much is enough, especially toward the end of a case, when your body has used up most of the anesthesia. Also, for certain high-risk surgeries, they have to go easy on the gas because you’re already in critical condition.

There can’t be any guarantees that you won’t wake up before they want you to. The good news is that, if you do, you’ll probably feel pressure, not pain. The pressure of instruments and strange hands deep inside your body, moving around—no wonder the PTSD rate is high.

5Doctors May Have Conflicts Of Interest

Everybody munches on freebies at the grocery store. Why shouldn’t doctors get free samples, too? Drug company reps offer them everything, from notepads to free pizza. Of course the physicians take some. Then they go on practicing medicine their own way. Probably. This isn’t a problem in itself—doctors have to eat and doodle just like the rest of us. Conflict of interest only gets serious when money and influence are at stake.

That happens a lot. Researchers say that 40 percent of the drug company directors they studied also held top posts at major academic medical centers. Those directors, on average, got well over $250,000 a year for their services. Then they went back to the medical center and ran its health care, research, and school their own way. Probably.

It also turns out that your medical care may be different—and possibly more expensive—if your doctor owns any labs and equipment or is a partner in a specialty hospital. Federal and state laws restrict self-referrals. In spite of that, it’s been shown that patients have more tests and more surgeries in areas where physicians own a lot of the local medical infrastructure.

4 No One Really Knows What Your Health Care Costs

When medical bills arrive, most people reach for their checkbook or maybe for the phone to call the insurance company (and possibly a bankruptcy lawyer). Would you believe the hospital might back off if you challenge the bill? Or that hospitals charge different prices depending on your insurance? They do this because nobody has a clue how much your visit actually costs. Don’t take our word for it. In 2004, the UC Davis Health System chief financial officer said, “There is no method to this madness. As we went through the years, we had these cockamamie formulas. We multiplied our costs to set our charges.”

Hospitals use a master price list called a “chargemaster.” Except in California, you don’t have the right to see one. Even if you do, it won’t make much sense. There’s no national standard for them, and everybody updates them differently. Your insurance company may get a discount of more than 50 percent off chargemaster prices. Uninsured? You’ll pay the full amount. Obamacare has caused a boom in medical billing specialists. But still no one is sure how to code your medical bill.

3Electronic Health Record Errors

Your medical records were once stored on paper. Doctors and hospitals have saved time, space, and money by switching over to the electronic health records. These wonderful software packages save lives, too, but nothing is perfect. Computer and human errors are also present. Even worse, contracts with the software companies are silencing physicians who want to complain about the software.

Errors are common. Doctors miss important lab results because the screen is badly designed. Medication doses are mixed up. Notes disappear. And no one is tracking these errors. It’s even possible that this has contributed to the US Ebola crisis. Thomas Duncan caught the bug in Liberia. After coming home, he went to a Dallas ER for symptoms that could easily have been something like the flu. He did tell them where he’d been, and a nurse did enter that into his electronic record. What happened next isn’t clear, but it’s possible that the nurse’s note wasn’t immediately available to the ER doctor and other health care providers because of a software design flaw. In any case, they didn’t immediately treat Mr. Duncan for Ebola, and he later died from the disease.

2Hacked Medical Devices

Medical equipment has NSA-level cybersecurity, right? No, not at all. Recently, a Midwestern US health care chain asked the IT department to hack equipment at its 100 facilities. It was horrifyingly easy for them to access medical records, reset medicine pumps, reprogram defibrillators, change refrigerator temperature settings, and to take down emergency and lab equipment. And that’s just what the company would publicly admit. Problems included weak passwords, infected devices, and poor firewalling. However, the system’s best feature—feeding embedded information directly into medical records—also made it a hacker’s dream.

This isn’t a one-off problem. Malware shut down a New Jersey heart catheterization lab in 2010. The Conficker virus was found on 104 devices in a Tampa VA hospital. An antivirus program forced a third of Rhode Island’s hospitals to postpone everything but emergency surgeries and treatment because it mistakenly identified a critical Windows DLL as malicious.

No patients have been harmed yet, fortunately. The FDA just released cybersecurity guidelines. While they’re not federal law, good luck getting your new medical device approved if it’s not secure. And the guidelines are a heads-up to the health care world that now is the time to somehow secure all the vulnerable equipment out there.

1Unfair Treatment Of Minorities Still Exists In The US

Americans once got different medical treatment based on their ethnic background. We’ve come a long way, but not as far as we think. In 2002, the Institute of Medicine found that minorities were routinely given lower-quality health care and denied some drugs and medical procedures. They were also more likely to have an amputation for diabetes. Researchers called for system changes, as well as for more minority providers and more interpreters to overcome language barriers. Six years later, a different group found the same problems. This group put their findings in a book that people could use to improve things in their own communities.

In some ways, people are even worse off in 2014. Doctors say that it’s a very complex problem. Insurance plans and providers don’t serve poor communities. There are also cultural differences, communication barriers, and lack of information on how to access the system.

+Faking Surgery For Science

Unfortunately, our example about secret placebo surgeries isn’t theoretical. It’s rare, but it has happened. In 2009, for example, a report was published in the New England Journal of Medicine that described how 63 patients with compression fractures from osteoporosis got “a simulated procedure without cement” as part of a study. This didn’t just happen at a single hospital, either. Several major medical centers were involved. Well, that sounds horrible, but the study proved that the real surgery probably wasn’t helping anybody. Was it worth it? When it comes to sham surgery, doctors are still trying to make up their minds.

Barb likes to write about science at her blog Flight To Wonder.

They say that beauty is pain, but some fashion trends are so horrifying that they’re actually painful for everyone who sees them. Strange moments in history have created some pretty strange fashions over the years, looks that (hopefully) will never be repeated or ever be seen again now that their time to be trendy has ended. Fashion may be cyclical, but some looks should never be dusted off.

You might have had the experience of stifling a giggle upon seeing what your parents were wearing in old photos, but those old clothes have nothing on the entries in this list. Look back at history’s most depressing fashion trends, and vow here and now never to wear a flour sack—no matter how many people are doing it!

10 Flour Sacking

What’s more depressing than a trend born of the Great Depression? In an era where nothing in America was wasted, flour sacks became the go-to dress material for women everywhere.^[1] The height of the trend came in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when rural fashion rose to its heyday. Country women who could sew neatly and quickly became the fashionistas of their era and dominated the national sewing competitions that sprung up across the US.

Thriftiness was in fashion, and the fashion trend known as flour sacking caught on everywhere. Women who were really adept at flour sack dresses even managed to earn extra money by selling their dresses to others. Companies like the National Cotton Council and the Textile Bag Manufacturers Association sponsored contests where women could show off their flour sack creations, which gave flour sack dresses their own sort of fashion clout.

By the 1940s, savvy sack makers were catering to the trend by producing bags in brighter colors and with more intricate patterns, hoping their products would be favored because of the prettier packaging. Large sacks of feed and flour were particularly desirable, as they provided much material. So when life gives you flour sacks . . . make a dress?

9 The TB look

Fashion has seen many strange trends in history, but one of the most questionable is the popular TB look. It was all the rage during Victorian days to mimic the effects of the disease, which made people look very pale and skinny in its final phases (just before they died).^[2] The look was partially inspired by popular literature of the day, particularly tragic tales like La Dame aux Camelias.

Because tuberculosis was rampant and not just the stuff of literary fancy, the TB look became a viable—and desirable—fashion trend. The look was popular for decades, reaching its height from 1780 to 1850. The thin, pale look brought on by the disease already fit in with beauty ideals among the upper classes. But this is where fashion sense and common sense are directly at odds with each other because for generations, women living in the Victorian era starved themselves and avoided sunlight so that they could look more like they were wasting away from tuberculosis. How attractive.

8 Hobble Skirts

In what now seems impossible, the hobble skirt was so popular that no one knows who really invented it because everyone wanted to take credit for it. It was the 1910s, and women were ready to express their fashion freedom by getting rid of the trends that shackled them in the past.^[3] Gone were the layers of petticoats, the big hoops, and the extra fabric. Instead, women started lashing their ankles together.

As soon as the skirt made its way from Paris to the US, it became the stuff of fashion scandal. Cartoonists drew caricatures of women attempting to walk in the restrictive skirts, and The New York Times wrote a giant article about the impact to the textile industry because so many petticoats would be sacrificed to the new trend. The story called the skirts “an ungraceful and immodest freak of fashion” and asked readers to imagine 10,000 families starving as a result.

But the trend just would not go away. Soon, so many women were wearing hobble skirts that streetcars and trains had to lower their entrance steps so that the ladies could still successfully climb aboard with their steps restricted. The hobble skirt trend may have continued to flourish, in fact, if World War I hadn’t changed everything for fashion the world over. New restrictions on fabric and a scarcity of manpower in Paris upset the fashion industry and put an end to the days of the hobble skirt. Happily, women chose not to go back to their petticoats just the same.

7 Scheele’s Green

If beauty is pain, then Scheele’s green is the most beautiful color ever.^[4] Karl Scheele was a chemist in Sweden when he created the pigment in the 1770s. The pretty green hue he found was cheap to make and easy to use in all sorts of items, from clothing to wallpaper. And that’s really too bad, since Scheele’s green was made with arsenic. Oops.

The gorgeous green was used in ball gowns and curtains, pretty much any home fabric, and was so commonplace that it surrounded none other than Napoleon in his final days. In fact, the arsenic-infused pigment may have contributed to his death. Since Scheele’s green was a hot color in Victorian Britain and elsewhere in Europe, he certainly wasn’t the shade’s only victim.

Scheele’s green was used in fashion for about 100 years, a century of death, before another chemist decided to take a good look at the pigment and discovered its true nature.

6 Bird Masks

Bird masks were part fashion trend, part professional necessity. The bird masks were first worn during the 17th century as a defense against the plague, but they inspired centuries of costume fashion and linger to this day as a popular masquerade choice.

The plague was deadly; it had decimated around one-third of Europe’s total population back in the 14th century, and it had periodically reared its ugly head since. Doctors roamed the streets and went into villages, tending to the afflicted. But to get the job done, they needed these masks.

The beaks on the masks weren’t just fashionable; they were functional.^[5] The masks were stuffed with fragrant flowers and herbs and worn directly over the nose. This kept the doctors from smelling the scents of death and decay as they attempted to haul away the dead bodies. The masks were worn due to the miasma theory, which held that disease was transmitted by poisonous, foul-smelling gas in the air, which was produced by decay.

5 Crinolines

It’s a must-have for every movie set in the latter half of the 1800s, and it featured so much in Gone With the Wind that it should have been given starring credit. It’s the crinoline, one of fashion’s deadliest and dumbest trends of all time. Made to give women’s skirts a big bell shape, crinolines, stiff petticoats that sometimes even had frames, literally killed thousands of people during their time in the fashion spotlight.

At their height in the 1850s and 1860s, crinolines made skirts too big and too puffy. That made them dangerous. In those two decades alone, an estimated 3,000 women in England died due to fires caused by crinolines.^[6] Big skirts and candles don’t mix well; nor do they make it easy for people to quickly escape a suddenly burning building. Some women simply ignited as a result of standing too close to the fireplace, while others died in massive events.

The most infamous crinoline fire occurred in 1863 at the Church of the Company of Jesus in Santiago, Chile. As many as 3,000 people died due to the amount of flammable crinolines in the room. In 1864, it was estimated that almost 40,000 women the world over had died due to crinoline-related fires since 1850.

4 Bullet Bras

An anomaly that the world hopes will stay confined to the late 1940s and 1950s, bullet bras were everywhere for a few years. The sharply pointed bras were worn by all the well-dressed women, and some designs were truly dangerous enough to put out an eye. The bullet bra became the must-have accessory for the classic pinup girls of the era.

More properly known as the Chansonette bra, the bullet bra appeared in Frederick’s of Hollywood and soon became a fashion icon.^[7] Part of the bra’s popularity was due to World War II and the nylon fabric restrictions it created; spiral stitching and different fabrics made bras stiffer and pointier.

The bullet bra faded into obscurity in the late 1950s with the rise of the softer, more gender-neutral fashions of the 1960s, though it did enjoy a resurgence in popularity thanks to Madonna’s 1990 “Blonde Ambition” look.

3 Armadillo Shoes

Though they haven’t been around long enough to really be historic, as they were designed by Alexander McQueen in 2010, armadillo shoes will surely go down as one of the worst of the worst. Everyone hopes these shoes will stay in the annals of fashion history, where they belong, never to be seen on a runway or at an award show again.

The first line of armadillo shoes were carved out of wood, which means they’re probably just as uncomfortable as they appear. The shoes were famously worn by Lady Gaga, who is notorious for bizarre fashion choices, and they sold for around $3,900 to $10,000 per pair.^[8] Only a relative few were ever produced—and only for extremely special clients, such as Gaga herself. Though Gaga made them work, one Vogue fashion blogger admitted they are impossible to walk in. No surprise there.

2 Zibellinos

Also known as tippets and flea furs, zibellinos were significant in fashion and worn only by the very wealthiest. If you were a high-ranking noble or member of a royal family, you wouldn’t go anywhere without his must-have accessory that was truly one of the most awful things ever.

Basically, a zibellino is the pelt of a marten or sable . . . with the head still attached.^[9] It’s worn simply draped over one arm, because that’s exactly where you want to hang your pelt. Sometimes, the heads were encrusted with gold and jewels.

It wasn’t until the end of the 16th century that faux versions were created to replace the actual animal remains.

1 Black Teeth

Today’s fashion is all about having white teeth, and you can’t watch TV or open a magazine without seeing an ad for whitener. But if you lived in Japan in the past, you’d need black teeth to be totally in fashion. Black teeth were a symbol of wealth and sexual prowess, particularly for women in Japanese society, for years.^[10] To get the look, they drank black dye mixed with cinnamon and spices for taste. The practice, called ohaguro, was outlawed in 1870, and the white teeth trend caught on after the Japanese empress showed off her own non-blackened smile in public.

But as it turns out, black teeth were better teeth, health-wise, anyway. The dye mixture used to created the blackened teeth look actually protected them from decay because it had a lacquer-like effect on the enamel. The mixture even warded off certain bacteria to promote better overall health. Maybe this is one trend that will make a comeback?

KC Morgan is a professional freelance writer. She has written thousands of articles, on every topic from history to food hacks. Whether KC is explaining how to complete a DIY project or exploring the world’s mysteries, she’s writing about something every single day.

The old saying goes that comedy is tragedy plus time. Simple math, then, holds that more tragedy equals more comedy. Many of our funniest comedians have lived the types of bleak, sorrowful lives that prove the equation true.

So many of the people who make us laugh struggle to find their own laughter that the phenomenon has its own psychological label: the sad clown paradox. They really give Pagliacci a run for his money.

For whatever reason, the correlation between misfortune and mirth is especially strong in the true comedic greats, the human factories that refine raw pain into concentrated wit. Here are ten such comedians, those who were given the worst of tragedies and gave us back the best of comedy.

10 Jim Carrey

Nowadays, Jim Carrey is a multimillionaire who could retire this second and coast off of royalties as long as he needed. But before the lucrative television and movie roles, Carrey grew up poor. As in homeless, traveling vagrant poor.

Carrey spent a large part of his teenage years in serious poverty. His family’s fortunes varied year to year, but never rose to the level of dependable comfort. The Carrey clan spent years with no house nor even apartment, living instead all together in a van and later a tent. Even the uptick in the family’s situation, when his father gained lucrative employment, still saw teenage Carrey and his brother working as night crew janitors for his father’s employer, just to make ends meet. Even when he ‘got out,’ Carrey spent years living the life of a struggling comedian, which many can attest is not much of an upgrade.

9 Patton Oswalt

Patton Oswalt has been the king of the alt-comics for decades now, and for a while, everything in his life was picturesque. He had made it as a comedian and writer, was raising a daughter, and had found his soulmate: a writer named Michelle McNamara. That is, until she died suddenly in her sleep, leaving Oswalt a heartbroken widower and single father.

McNamara died without warning on April 21, 2016, from an unknown heart condition combined with a mix of prescription drugs—an unpredictable and surprising death. Oswalt, whose work is by nature self-reflective and confessional, has gone into great detail about how the death affected him and his daughter, including “the worst day of (his) life”: the first time he told his daughter that her mother was dead. It’s a sorrowful—but enlightening—story.

8 Maria Bamford

If there’s a poster child for mental illness (outside of vicious murderer-cannibals and the like), it’s Maria Bamford. Bamford’s comedy has repeatedly delved into her various mental issues, such as depression, anxiety, OCD, suicidal thoughts, and bipolar disorder. Dealing with several issues at once for so long has made Bamford’s life a constant struggle.

Though she always makes it hilarious, Bamford nonetheless delves deep into her struggles on stage, including the time she checked herself into a psych ward because she was close to killing herself. Luckily, she was able to avert the disaster, but Bamford’s internal fight for cognitive control is still ongoing.

7 Pete Davidson

Pete Davidson is another comedian who has worked his personal tragedy into his work. Davidson’s father was a New York City firefighter who died while responding to the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers. Davidson was only seven at the time.

Whether directly stemming from the trauma or not, Davidson has suffered from mental health problems for most of his life. As a child at school, he once suffered a breakdown and pulled all the hair out from his scalp. He also famously posted suicidal thoughts on Instagram before quickly deleting his account altogether, prompting police to locate him and perform a wellness check. Luckily, he is still around and still seeking help.

6 Andy Dick

Many of those closest to Andy Dick have described him as being two separate people: sober Andy and drunk Andy. Dick has become notorious for his drug and alcohol use and the erratic, destructive behaviors it has caused. In an effort to treat himself, Dick has been in rehab programs more than two dozen times.

Dick is now so notorious for his constantly inappropriate behavior that new allegations and charges now blend in with the rest; his conduct is becoming normalized. Despite many high-profile public figures facing overdue consequences in the wake of the #metoo movement, Dick has never received the same public flogging- even though he has allegedly committed an unbelievable amount of offensives such as indecent exposures, sexual assaults, sexual batteries, sexual abuse, and more. It remains to be seen if any treatment will stick for Dick and beat his addiction once and for all.

5 Mitch Hedberg

Mitch Hedberg was one of the all-time great short-form joke writers. An average stand-up set from Hedberg would contain dozens of pithy, witty jokes and his impressive facility for wordplay and observation made him a huge cult hit. Hedberg was also heavily addicted to drugs and never fully committed to getting clean.

Hedberg was outspoken about his drug use; he often discussed it on stage and in interviews. Perhaps his most famous joke is, “I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.” Sadly, he was equally outspoken about not wanting to quit. Friend and fellow comedian Artie Lange, best known for his tenure on MadTV, once quoted Hedberg as saying, “Guys, don’t try to help me. I want to do heroin until I die.” In 2005, at age 37, his wish—whether joking or not—came true.

4 John Belushi

The theme of these accounts should be apparent by now, and John Belushi was no exception. Belushi was a member of the Not Ready for Primetime Players, the original SNL lineup. He consistently stole scenes with his physical humor and energy. As he became more famous and began working on more projects at once, Belushi started finding that energy elsewhere: most notably cocaine.

As Belushi began using more and more, with increasingly obvious effects, his friends and coworkers, including Carrie Fischer and “Animal House” director John Landis, attempted to coax Belushi into rehab. They failed. As he fell deeper into his addiction, Belushi began using heroin. It was an overdose of cocaine and heroin—also called a speedball—that ultimately ended his life at age 33.

3 Chris Farley

It’s hard to mention the tragic rise and fall of John Belushi without then mentioning Chris Farley. Farley’s career and personal trajectory mirrored Belushi’s uncannily closely. Farley, like Belushi, became famous as a cast member on SNL, and again like Belushi, was known for his high energy, physical humor despite his large size. Some of his most memorable skits include “Chip n’ Dales” and “Van Down by the Mirror.” Seriously—they’re hilarious, and you should go watch them right after you read this article.

The comparison continues as Farley also began taking on more and more projects, all the while falling deeper into a life of drugs. Farley’s obesity caused its own problems, as well. All told, the actor sought help for obesity and drug addiction 17 times by his death, though none were successful. He died of an overdose of cocaine and morphine at age 33.

2 Robin Williams

Robin Williams might just be the most beloved comedian ever. In addition to his extraordinary stand-up work, he starred in a range of fan-favorite films and stole almost every scene he was in. His relentless energy and manic delivery made him both completely unique and legendary. But behind that endless brightness were dark battles with disease and addiction.

Williams spent much of the 70s and 80s addicted to cocaine and though he eventually quit the drug, he then had another battle with alcoholism. Underpinning all of this was William’s well-known struggles with depression. Eventually, and only because of the autopsy after his death by suicide, it was discovered that Williams had Dementia with Lewy Bodies, which was causing his mind to unravel at the seams. His final days were plagued with anxiety, paranoia, and lost memories.

1 Richard Pryor

Richard Pryor is one of the greatest comedians of all time and, over the course of his life, brought happiness to millions. You’d be hard-pressed, however, to find a single period of that life in which Pryor found any lasting happiness himself.

Pryor grew up in a brothel where his mother was a prostitute, even turning tricks for his town mayor at one point. His mother eventually abandoned him and left him to his grandmother, the brothel’s owner, who frequently beat him. He was molested multiple times, first by an older kid, and later by a Catholic priest. His adult life was scarcely much better. Pryor was divorced seven times, had recurring problems with drugs and alcohol, and even infamously set himself on fire while high on cocaine. It was his constant smoking that eventually killed him, as it partially brought on the coronary artery disease that caused his fatal heart attack.