Bob Kazel was a gifted writer, a devoted friend, a caring volunteer, an enthusiastic karaoke singer and mentally ill. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when he was 18, and for the next 44 years battled manic depression until he died on Sept. 17.
“He was a fighter,” said Patrick Kennedy, the former congressman who turned his own mental illness and addiction into a platform to encourage others to speak out and fund treatment and research.
Kazel was born in Chicago — his father, Sidney, an electrical engineer, died in a car accident when Bob was 14. His mother, Beverly, became his steadfast supporter. Kazel was editor of the newspaper at Von Steuben High School and set his sights on the Northwestern Medill School of Journalism.
“He always wanted to be a journalist,” said his older brother Mitch. “When he was under 10, he got a typewriter for his birthday. He immediately started putting out a one-page newsletter of what was going on at home, with headlines like, ‘MOM TO MAKE SPAGHETTI.'”
Kazel got into Northwestern. Then things began to go wrong.
“I started feeling overwhelmed,” he said in “Profiles in Mental Health Courage,” a 2024 book Kennedy wrote with journalist Stephen Fried.
Kazel ended his first semester in the psych ward at Evanston Hospital. He went on lithium and restarted the next year at Medill, where he shined.
“Oh, my God, he was the best writer at The Daily Northwestern,” said Jonathan Eig, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for his biography, “King: A Life.” “We had a few Pulitzers come out of that group, but he was the best. Incredibly creative.”
Eig pointed to a story Kazel wrote after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986. Kazel rode the L back from a downtown Medill class and pondered the subdued CTA riders.
“Television,” wrote Kazel, then 22, “a keeper of dreams that had guided them all their lives around the world’s realness, had betrayed their trust and shown them their own nightmares. A glimpse of chaos, of a baffling arbitrariness that they now saw clearly and would try to work out, by themselves.”
For Kazel, mental illness reflected the same “baffling arbitrariness.”
“Bob took his meds, went to his psychiatrist, took good care of himself, and for periods he could live his life,” Fried said. “Then his symptoms would break through.”
“He had to rebuild his life every time,” Eig said. “He’d lose his job, sometimes he’d lose his apartment. It was harder and harder each time to find a new job and new apartment. He struggled so much. Sometimes he was in jail, or got picked up starting a fight in a bar. There were times I didn’t answer his calls, at 3 o’clock in the morning.”
“He would go through these spurts, have these manic episodes,” said John O’Neill, a former editor at the Chicago Sun-Times.
For three years, Kazel wrote for the American Medical Association magazine.
Taking lithium long-term can damage your kidneys, and Kazel ended up on dialysis with kidney failure.
“He was still tutoring, still volunteering, still teaching English while in bed, getting dialysis three times a week,” Fried said. “It was an incredible gift to get to know this guy. It wasn’t easy for him. He didn’t pretend it was.”
Kazel died at a nursing home in Niles. His friends remembered, not the illness, but the man who never surrendered.
“Bob accomplished so much given all the challenges he had,” said Ellen Somers, a mental health counselor in Syracuse, New York. “He was always doing something very helpful for others. He worked on a crisis line while he was in the nursing home. He worked with high school students. He was finding meaning in his life, figuring out how to be productive, despite the many things that restricted him.”
“He was never self-pitying,” said Flynn McRoberts, managing editor for investigations at Bloomberg News who knew Kazel at Northwestern. “Just the opposite. He’d take advantage of every opportunity to relish a friendship. Just a sweet, kind, smart, funny person.”
“There were more moments of joy than sadness,” Eig wrote in a moving tribute in The Daily Northwestern. “He danced at my wedding. He recorded his favorite karaoke songs for my daughter on the day she was born. He never missed a holiday dinner at our table unless he was sick. My kids called him Uncle Bob.”
“Bob was a journalist. He understood the power of telling true, in-depth stories,” Fried said. “Bob was really good at explaining how people struggle with mental illness and addiction. He was a very sweet guy who had every reason not to be, because he had a tough life. But he kept an amazingly positive attitude.”