Suicide. Depression. It has been all over the news for over a week now. We lost a legend, he took his own life and the world is undoubtedly less of a place without him. Whilst I was incredibly sad to see the actor that I grew up watching had taken his life, I was equally as upset by the comments people were making in regards to his actions, most of them I wont even waste the energy to type, but so much of what I saw on the internet was that people perceived his actions as selfish.
I am not naive enough to assume that everybody is educated on mental illness. I am not naive enough to assume that there is a universal opinion opinion on depression and other mental illnesses. I understand that to a lot of people, the concept that somebody who had a family that loved them and seemingly everything to live for could take their own life is incomprehensible, I understand that, I do. It is only through educating and discussion that the understanding of what could lead a person to take their own life, despite having external factors that, on paper, should be adding to their life. The last ten days have been incredibly triggering for me, I have been having some incredibly dark thoughts about my own failed suicide attempts, and I feel like discussing it a little more may help my mind let go some of what has been consuming me so fiercely.
I am not supporting suicide at all. I have myself seen people I have cared about take their own lives. The feeling that you are left with is indescribable. To think you could have picked up on a sign or even said something differently, you replay every single conversation that you had with them and with a fine tooth comb, search for something, anything, that could have signalled it; a misplaced sigh, a tone of voice, anything. The people who are left behind, if any, are as much a victim as the person who has gone, and I do not at all discount their pain or suffering.
Depression is a horrible, horrible disease. It creeps into your mind and steals the very essence of you. It obliterates the parts of you that feel joy, that is able to comprehend any emotion or reality outside of what you are currently feeling. It is as though someone has turned the brightness down on the world; everything is bleak, feeling becomes a thing of the past, and if you have moments where you can feel; it's extreme sadness and the pure and utter self loathing and hatred. You are noting. You are worthless. You are a waste of space. You do not deserve to be breathing in the air that you are breathing in. You are redundant. You are a disgrace to humanity.
Love unfortunately is not enough. It doesn't matter if there are people who love you, and it doesn't matter if you have 'things to live for' there is a disease inside your brain that is distorting your reality and causing an inherent lack of rational understanding or decision making. Your mind could be telling you that the sky is green, and when you glance at the sky to check; it's blue, but that doesn't matter, because the more your mind tells you that it's green, the more it becomes green when you look at it.
The mind is a weapon of destruction. Depression is cruel, and callous and takes no prisoners. It doesn't care how much money you have or how many people love you, if it wants you, it will get you. For some it's relatively minor and for some it is crippling and soul destroying.
When you are floating in oblivion, robbed of all of your senses, all of the parts that make you who you were, numbed of anything but insurmountable pain, it is hard to lift your head off your pillow each morning. There are silent warriors amongst us, who despite all of that, can put one foot in front of the other and function enough to get through a day. Some are able to fight it, some are able to reach out and ask for help, some are lucky enough to have people that are able to see their suffering and get help.
But for some people, in one moment, taking their life is an option that is put on the table in front of them, and it only takes that one moment that that option crosses their mind for them to take it.
For myself, I was in an extreme amount of pain and I couldn't take it anymore, I was flicking between pain and numbness and both of them felt too hard for me to be able to endure any longer, and my mind told me over and over again that there was a way for me to relieve myself of all of that and to be unburdened, and I tried. Twice. Thankfully for me, I failed and have been in treatment since, but some people aren't given the help that I was lucky enough to receive and still be receiving now.
So please, the next time that you call someone selfish for taking their own life, just remember that depression is all consuming, it takes you from the inside out, there is very little that the mind is able to grasp outside of the internal suffering. It's a very selfish illness in terms of the fact that it focuses on the person and only that person, it's not a choice. It tells you how much you have failed as human being, how much you deserve to be suffering, how awful you are... With every single second of the day, there is very little time when a person isn't suffering, whether it is with feelings of nothingness, or feelings of despair. There is no future; just now, just what you are feeling. You are in a bubble whilst life carries on around you and without you.
Being loved and loving other people doesn't make you immune from it. It doesn't make you a failure as parent/child/spouse/friend/whatever, you can be so loved, yet so deeply aching inside. Just because the person has children, doesn't mean that the love they have for their kids isn't there, absolutely not.
Depression extinguishes the human spirit, but it can be overcome. There is help available out there, and there are people who want to listen and help you. Even if it's just me, through my blog posts, I care that you are alive.
I recently watched a video made by Matt Ganley (which actually inspired this post) in which he says that we are in an era where by we are able to have the insight for compassion, and be concerned with human flourishing and human well being, understanding and empathy. And he is so right, our generation is a lot more willing to try to understand others. We can use technology to say whatever we want, and people are becoming more in tune to mental illness and we can use social media to help talk about it and eradicate the stigmas and misconceptions that generations before us created. All it takes is one conversation with one other person, it may make all the difference in the world for another human being.
(US) National Suicide Prevention Lifeline - 1–800–273-TALK (8255)
- (UK) Samaritans - 08457 90 90 90
- International Association for Suicide Prevention
Matt Ganley's video that inspired this post is here at http://youtu.be/ySg6nnxZdqE
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