EXCLUSIVE: Kabir Bedi on his son Siddharth’s suicide – “There’s always guilt and you have to live with that” : Bollywood News

Actor Kabir Bedi has launched his autobiography 'Stories I Must Tell: The Emotional Journey of an Actor' where he speaks about his life as an actor, his relationships, and the death of his son. The actor's son Siddharth, who took his own life in 1997 at the age of 25. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Kabir Bedi admits that guilt is enormous and will always remain.

EXCLUSIVE: Kabir Bedi on his son Siddharth’s suicide – “There’s always guilt and you have to live with that”

Speaking to Bollywood Hungama, Kabir Bedi spoke about the chapter dedicated to his son. "Siddharth was a very brilliant young man. He was exceptional in his abilities, and then suddenly, one day, he couldn't think. We tried so hard to first figure out what was wrong, and for three years, we battled these unknown ghosts, and eventually, he had this extremely violent breakout in the streets of Montreal, and it took eight policemen to nail him down. And then, the doctors in Montreal finally diagnosed him as schizophrenic," he said.

"He came to Los Angeles and I and we tried our best to battle this. In the end, it is a battle that I lost because he chose to go through suicide. He couldn't bear the world that schizophrenia gave him." he added.

He said that through this chapter in his book, he wanted to talk about what families go through when a person is diagnosed with schizophrenia "because the person they are seeing is not the person they knew. He is more irrationally, uncontrollably, unpredictably. The family suffers as much as the person suffering. It is important for families to know about the person who is suffering is 'don't stop loving that person'."

Speaking of why he chose to write about his son and especially this chapter of his life, Kabir Bedi said that he wanted families to know that it is important to show compassion to the person who is suffering and their families. "The guilt one suffers when somebody in your family commits suicide is enormous, no matter how much you try. You always feel you could have done something to save that person's life. Why have you failed to convince him to live, why have you not tried to stop him in some way? There's always guilt and you have to live with that guilt as well. When something that traumatic happens, when your son commits suicide, the wound heals, but the scars will always remain. You learn to live with it because it's truly been an experience to go way. It will always remain there in some way."