Bottom line, it's a story in which a series of stupidly unrealistic, out-of-character circumstances occurred for obviously no other reason that to push a character into behaving in a stupidly unrealistic, out-of-character fashion. Writers who want to do this shit should keep it on their LiveJournals and their FanFiction.net accounts, and the hell out of writing that they expect anyone to pay any amount of money for. There were countless intervals, BEFORE it got SO bad, that he COULD have turned to others for help, WITHOUT shame, but of course, that would require him to have more than two braincells, and to be written as more than just a Canon Woobie. I'll echo another poster - the ONLY way it could get THAT bad is if, quite literally, almost EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER in the DCU was behaving OOC, since if Dick DOESN'T check in with them after a long enough period of time, do you seriously think that somebody like Barbara is just going to say, "Oh, well, I left him a message, sucks to be him"?